Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism

HUMAN DIGNITY AND CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM Brad Stetson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stetson, Brad. Human dignity and contemporary liberalism / Brad Stetson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–94625–8 (alk. paper) 1. Liberalism—United States. 2. Dignity. 3. Natural law. I. Title. JC574.2.U6S74 1998 320.51'3'0973—dc21 97–22813 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright
1998 by Brad Stetson All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97–22813 ISBN: 0–275–94625–8 First published in 1998 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my precious daughter, Hannah

How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree. —William Butler Yeats, ‘‘A Prayer for My Daughter’’

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

A Word to the Reader

xiii I THEORETICAL

1

Human Dignity: Rhetoric Versus Reality

2

The Importance of Desert

3 43

II PRACTICAL 3

The Work of Contemporary Liberalism

4

Concluding Remarks: Human Dignity in the Twenty-First Century

87 165

Selected Bibliography

171

Index

181

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to many people and organizations for their various kinds of assistance in the development and production of this book. I would specifically like to thank William B. Allen, Tony Battaglia, Steve Bivens, J. Budziszewski, Joseph G. Conti, Jim Elmore, Stan Faryna, Clarke D. Forsythe, Jim Ice, Anne D. Kiefer, Wendy Lucas, Frederick R. Lynch, Alicia Merritt, Liz Murphy, John H. Miller, Frank Montejano, Betty Pessagno, Nina Pearlstein, Jesse Peterson, Carlos Piar, Dennis Rasmussen, Patrick Robertson, James Sabin, Al Schmidt, John and Carol Stetson, Nina Stetson, Stephen Thacker, Ed Trenner, Anthony and Delia Trujillo, Olivia Vlahos, Lynn Zelem, Americans United for Life, Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, Capital Resource Center, CityTeam Ministries, and the David Institute. Of course, none of these individuals or organizations are responsible for any errors or omissions in this work.

PREFACE As the American century draws to a close, the United States finds itself caught in a troubling paradox: while it enjoys an unchallenged geopolitical hegemony in the post–cold war world, its internal civic life is riven with strife and deep disaffection. From affirmative action and immigration to racial politics, welfare reform, and abortion, American public life seems little more than a monotonous series of acrimonious and routinized debates, consistently generating more heat than light. Increasingly, the stark analysis of Alisdair MacIntyre is proving true: ‘‘Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.’’1 And yet the Kulturkampf continues, unexhausted by the depth of conflict or incommensurability of moral and political bases and assumptions. There are no doubt many different explanations for this persistence, but undeniably it demonstrates the essentially moral nature of the human being, the irrepressibly ethical bent of each of us. We are driven to normative deliberation even in the context of intractably rival visions. We are chained to questions of the good and the right. Inevitably, we confront one another—and sometimes ourselves—with such questions, as we expect our social order to embody at least a modicum of sound moral reasoning and principle. This is cause for a restrained optimism, for if we as a fractured people are ever to begin the journey back toward a coherent public philosophy and the recovery of a common citizenship, it can only be through a moral lingua franca of some manner and degree. This book is a limited effort at limning one aspect of this endeavor, an aspect centered on the viability of human dignity, rightly understood, as an ordering concept for contemporary political theory and social life. With any physical illness, pathogens must be identified and examined if efforts at remedy are to forge any progress. So too, with the body politic. Hence, this book’s reflections on human dignity in American po-

xii

Preface

litical thought and practice are combined with concurrent criticisms of what I see to be a primary impediment to American civic restoration: the complex of ideas and values that comprise the core of contemporary liberalism. This book argues that the nature and application of contemporary liberalism is significantly dissonant with the deepest inclinations and most persistent moral sentiments of human beings, and it therefore distorts human self-understanding and defaces human dignity. This mismatch between human nature and the essence of contemporary liberalism hobbles our public life, and—I would like to suggest in this argument—is the Gordian knot that must be loosened if the new millennium is to manifest a more humane and generally satisfying American civitas. This book is divided into two sharply distinct parts. The first part, the theoretical, begins with a discussion of certain consequences and implications of contemporary liberalism’s heavy emphasis on individual rights, and moves into a reflection on two general categories of human dignity, suggesting that there is in contemporary liberal thought a lack of clarity concerning the meaning and gravity of this concept. This first chapter concludes with the assertion that contemporary American society has profoundly degraded the value of human life and that the critical force of postmodernism is a primary reason for this tragedy. Chapter 2, which is more academic in tone, focuses on the idea of desert, or ‘‘deservingness.’’ After tracing some of the major lines of scholarly debate over critical aspects of what I take to be this centrally important topic, the viability of desert, rightly understood, is advanced as a useful general concept for understanding American public life, and as an important tool for restoring a measure of common sense to our politics. Part II, the practical, is a less formal discussion, since it concentrates on the actual operation of contemporary liberalism’s values as it has occurred since the 1960s, particularly in the culturally contentious areas of race and abortion. Emerging from this survey is an unflattering image of a political paradigm that must be abandoned, or at least radically revised, if America at the dawn of the new millennium is to strike a posture of moral intensity and genuine social understanding, an orientation that can incite a social ethos able to provide both national stability and enduring global leadership. NOTE 1. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 253.

A WORD TO THE READER This book aims to address vast topics (human dignity, liberalism, etc.) and to engage in synthesizing broad spheres of inquiry (e.g., human dignity, desert, the workings of contemporary liberalism). Therefore, the discussions perforce remain on a decidedly general level, holistically treating subjects that, on their own, could fill volumes. I have chosen this format of analysis in an effort to provide a wide perspective, one that may raise new possibilities of political criticism regarding contemporary liberalism, and thereby stimulate socially useful thinking about human beings, social organization, and cultural conflict. The nature of the discussions and notes on sources reflects this high degree of generality. Partly as a consequence of the holistic nature of the narrative, some detailed discussions and important qualifiers appear in the endnotes of each chapter. Hence, the notes as a whole should be treated as a sort of parallel narrative rather than as bibliographical messages only. For the reader to have an accurate sense of this book’s substance and thrust, it is important to read the notes. While much of this book is polemical in nature, sometimes sharply so, the work is intended as a constructive critique of contemporary liberalism, and not simply as a rhetorical assault. That is, I hope ultimately to open doors of dialogue through these reflections, not close them. I certainly recognize that philosophical alternatives to contemporary liberalism are not themselves free of difficulties and shortcomings. Hence, any writers or individuals described as representing some aspect of modern liberalism should not construe any criticisms of their ideas as personal attacks or as attempts to denigrate them. Similarly, readers who understand themselves to be part of the contemporary liberal paradigm should not feel that any animosity is directed at them individually.

xiv

A Word to the Reader

I have selected remarks from the late journalist Walter Lippmann as epigrams for this book. His various remarks are drawn from a 1940 speech presented at Harvard University on the eve of American involvement in World War II. In this speech, he scathingly criticized what he saw as the moral lassitude of his generation. Its successors, those who came of age in the 1960s and established the hegemony of contemporary liberalism, still stand in need of his wise words. While Lippmann’s own politics were moderately liberal, he stood in the tradition of classical liberalism, not its modern descendant which has so profoundly defaced that respectable name. Lippmann’s journey from New Dealer to firm opponent of collectivism, along with his keen moral insight and bracing honesty, well represent the political and ethical sense we desperately need today.

I THEORETICAL

1 HUMAN DIGNITY: RHETORIC VERSUS REALITY For every right that you cherish, you have a duty which you must fulfill. For every hope that you entertain, you have a task that you must perform. For every good that you wish to preserve, you will have to sacrifice your comfort and your ease. —Walter Lippmann

This can hardly be said to be a time when talk of human dignity is scarce. The violence of our time and the coarse spirit of the age have compelled people of vastly different worldviews and moral codes to recognize the precariousness of the human condition, and the imperative of articulating defenses of human beings and human liberties. The high value of people and their freedom is a regular theme of social and political organizations—from governmental to civic to religious—seeking to justify and secure the fundamental liberties of their constituencies. In the wake of two world wars and the horrors of Auschwitz, Dachau, and other atrocities across the globe, the human community at this fin de sie`cle has authored numerous far-reaching and potent statements intended to safeguard basic human welfare, rights, and freedoms.1 Indeed, the prevalence and vigor of such articulations are testimony to their theoretical and practical importance. As social philosopher Joel Feinberg has well-noted, without bedrock human rights Persons would no longer hope for decent treatment from others on the ground of desert or rightful claim. Indeed, they would come to think of themselves as having no special claim to kindness or consideration from others, so that whenever even minimally decent treatment is forthcoming they would think themselves lucky rather than inherently deserving. . . . Rights, on the other hand, are not mere gifts or favors, motivated by love

4

Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism or pity, for which gratitude is the sole fitting response. A right is something a man can stand on, something that can be demanded or insisted upon without embarrassment or shame.2

CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM AND ITS ASSERTION OF HUMAN DIGNITY When Joel Feinberg wrote those words in 1966, in the midst of the cold war and communist repression of a sizable percentage of the world’s population, the bold demand and unwavering insistence on the nonderogability of human rights was fitting and obviously appropriate. But today (1997), in the United States and much of Europe, the language of human rights and personal entitlement has been degraded and perverted. The promiscuous incanting of ‘‘rights’’—whether from racial interest groups (e.g., the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Rainbow Coalition, MALDEF, MECHA), women’s rights organizations (e.g., NOW, NARAL, AAUW, EMILY’s List), welfare rights defenders (e.g., Children’s Defense Fund), ‘‘public-interest’’ legal lobbies (the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, People for the American Way), or animal rights advocates (e.g., PETA)—has led to a colossal devaluing of the concept. Where once the language of human rights primarily concerned the most basic entitlements to personal safety and freedom of conscience, it is now little more than a shopworn and often discounted trump, shouted by an advocate against his opponents in an effort to intimidate them into silence and submissive acceptance of the advocate’s claims.3 All too often, especially in the United States, this political bullying succeeds. Contemporary Liberalism This is, of course, a tremendously destructive phenomenon. We are now a decisively rights-saturated society, with manic concern for peoples’ entitlements and self-asserted liberties conditioning virtually every framing of social and cultural considerations. American political discourse at the end of the twentieth century has become, in Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon’s now common phrase, ‘‘rights talk.’’4 The consequences for the American commonweal could hardly be worse, as Professor Glendon writes: An intemperate rhetoric of personal liberty . . . corrodes the social foundations on which individual freedom and security ultimately rest. . . . Our rights talk, in its absoluteness, promotes unrealistic expectations, heightens social conflict, and inhibits dialogue that might lead toward consensus, accommodation, or at least the discovery of common ground. In its silence

Human Dignity

5

concerning responsibilities, it seems to condone acceptance of the benefits of living in a democratic social welfare state, without accepting the corresponding personal and civic obligations.5

The rhetoric of rights is definitional of the national language today because it is definitional of the dominant political philosophy: contemporary liberalism.6 Later in this book we will address the nature and work of contemporary liberalism; at this early stage of our discussion, we must note its conceptual rudiments. Robert H. Bork, in his bestselling, comprehensive critique of contemporary liberalism, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, presents its two philosophical foundations: radical egalitarianism and radical individualism.7 Radical egalitarianism is a commitment to equality of outcomes rather than simple equality of opportunity, whereas radical individualism is an insistence on eliminating virtually all social and legal curbs on personal gratification. Egalitarianism, enforced by the state and its bureaucratic apparatus, and hyperindividualism, enforced by both antibourgeois activist courts and the culturally ambient hedonism that characterizes American life today, combine to propel American culture down the paradoxical path of intellectual conformity and personal debauchery.8 Throughout his exhaustive study, Bork is careful to distinguish between contemporary and classical liberalism. Other trenchant critics of today’s liberal mind have done likewise.9 Classical liberalism is quite unlike today’s liberal orientation, as it bears a greater consonance with what is today called conservatism. Classical liberalism, sometimes called ‘‘laissez-faire liberalism,’’ is in its historic philosophical sense broadly descended from the Enlightenment project of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Voltaire (Franc¸ ois Marie Arouet), Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill.10 Filtered through the prism of the American founding and the new nation’s fitful rise through two centuries to international hegemony, liberalism (in its now largely conservative sense) primarily centers on concepts such as property rights, reduced taxation, bourgeois values, anticommunism, legal colorblindness and equal protection under the law, a libertarian view of personal liberty, and laissez-faire capitalism.11 Contemporary liberalism, spawned from the intercourse of American leftism and liberalism in the context of the new affluence, moral adventurism, and cultural restlessness of the 1960s has come to carry little resemblance to the rational tradition whose name it bears.12 The liberalism of today is a decisive rejection of the true liberal tradition and the American mores that tradition has been so central in forging. A profile of the new liberalism as practiced in this country at the end of the twentieth century is not flattering. It would include the assertions that contemporary liberalism is: addicted to the politics of victimization; averse

6

Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism

to the nuclear family; deeply hostile to basic welfare reform; reluctant to genuinely condemn out-of-wedlock births; supportive of racial quotas and race-based policies in government and public education; supportive of group identification and doctrinaire multiculturalism; disinclined to advocate personal moral accountability, instead blaming criminal behavior on economic conditions like poverty; obsessed with the categories of race, class, and gender; supportive of misandrist gender feminism and quotas for women; profoundly disrespectful of prenatal human life; opposed to open, public expressions of conservative Christian and Jewish faith; supportive of judicial activism and the courts as agents of cultural change; and intolerant of those who oppose its positions, routinely replacing debate with ad hominem attacks such as ‘‘racist,’’ ‘‘sexist,’’ ‘‘misogynist,’’ ‘‘homophobe,’’ and ‘‘mean-spirited.’’13 Ironically, then, while contemporary liberalism in this country tends to tout itself as tolerant and intellectually wide open—and while the spirit of true liberalism is genuinely tolerant—the liberalism of today is decisively authoritarian in its inclinations and intolerant in its characteristics, with standards of political correctness that are as discernible here on the left as they were in the former Soviet Union. Paramount for the contemporary liberals is conformity to their ideological paradigm, not liberty. This is highly problematic for our commonweal, for a fundamental presupposition of democratic government is that citizens can debate among themselves the respective merits of various ideas and policies, and then through their common human experience and good judgment reach a consensus on the best course for their country. Underlying this basic political mechanism is the assumption that partisans will confine their polemics to issues and resist the temptation to attack the personality or motives of those who disagree with them. If this unspoken agreement is violated, the vehicle of democracy becomes stalled, and what could have been unfettered, open debate degenerates into a narrow, routinized contest of slogans and political manipulation of the public. But this is the lamentable state of affairs in American politics today, and it is a major reason why the national disagreements over culturally defining issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and immigration are mired in such intractability. True debate, which requires at least two parties, has died at the self-congratulating hands of a holier-than-thou contemporary liberalism.14 By endowing itself with superior political motives, greater empathy, and a more refined moral sense, contemporary liberalism has shortcircuited the democratic process that was designed to extract from philosophical frictions the distilled substance of democracy. Why dialogue with your opponent, if you know that opponent is not dealing in good faith with you, and is only capable of unkindness and brutal but veiled

Human Dignity

7

selfishness? Your attitude will naturally take on the rigidly doctrinaire partisanship displayed in the title of Democratic super-consultant James Carville’s recent book, We’re Right, They’re Not!15 Consider these typical, common responses of many American liberals to some recent political and social controversies. Do they not illustrate liberals’ commitment to the belief that conservatives are mean people?: • If you are dissatisfied with current immigration policies and favored California’s Proposition 187 in the 1994 midterm elections, you’re a Eurocentric racist. • If you disapprove of prevailing affirmative action practices, and question the morality of racial and gender preferences, you’re also a racist, and you want to restrict career opportunities for women and minorities. • If you do not think abortion on demand—throughout the nine months of pregnancy—should be legal (as it presently is) and paid for by taxpayers in some states (as it presently is), then you are a misogynist who wants to control women’s bodies. • If you resist the public and legal recognition of homosexuality as morally identical to heterosexuality, then you have a mental illness, homophobia, and this disease causes you to favor discriminatory policies against homosexuals. • If you think the full integration of women into military culture—including air, ground, and sea combat units—is unwise, and if you think it is valuable to preserve the venerable option of all-male college education, you only show how much you want to turn the clock back on women’s equality.

And the list could go on and on. The basic truth defining current political discourse is this: conservatives simply think liberals are wrong, but liberals think conservatives are bad. The conservative is willing to accept the noble motivations of the liberal, but the liberal commonly ascribes ‘‘meanspiritedness’’ or simple selfishness to the conservative. Thus, the ad hominem argument has become the currency of contemporary liberal political practice, and the whole republic is diminished because of it. While, as we have said, the new liberalism diverges at many points from its classical antecedent, it most significantly does so concerning human nature. Though Enlightenment liberalism—particularly in the hands of Rousseau and Voltaire—itself evidenced a newfound confidence and trust in man’s own rational capacities and in his ability to autonomously manage the circumstances of his life (both individual and social), this amelioristic optimism about humanity was nonetheless tempered by the myriad social, cultural, and religious controls of the still ascendant Judeo-Christian heritage and deeply bourgeois ethos. But now at the end of the millennium a stridently reformist—and not merely op-

8

Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism

timistic—perspective on human nature characterizes liberalism. Contemporary liberalism, is, in its essence, a political movement defined by its commitment to reshape human nature. There can be no doubt that reflections on human nature are vast and have preoccupied much of the history of philosophy.16 While the full derivation of contemporary liberalism’s outlook on human nature is well beyond our purview, it is important for us to highlight the new liberalism’s depth and intensity of belief in the positive malleability of man. Thomas Sowell has helpfully located this advocacy of the ameliorative plasticity of human nature in what he calls the ‘‘unconstrained vision’’ held generally by the political left and contemporary liberalism.17 This is a posture that sees man as naturally capable of ranking other people’s needs higher than his own, and naturally able, and willing, to act altruistically.18 On this reckoning the human being is not constrained by nature or the unpredictableness of social and political contingencies. Rather, the basic problem facing humanity is that prevailing policies and programs are not yet designed sufficiently well. Sowell presents concisely the key elements of this perspective, explaining that the unconstrained vision holds that Man is, in short, ‘‘perfectible’’—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection . . . The notion that ‘‘the human being is highly plastic material’’ is still central among many contemporary thinkers who share the unconstrained vision. . . . [In this view] there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. . . . The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions, which are viewed as ultimately decisive. The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions. . . . [It] tend[s] to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past.19

Hence contemporary liberalism operates on an anthropological base that is quite different from the Judeo-Christian heritage so foundational to Western culture. In that view, man is fallen and imperfect, inclined to selfishness, and opportunistic. He can learn a measure of virtue through the practice of sound moral habit, but his natural state is persistently and deeply self-regarding.20 This was the general view of the Founders, as evidenced, for example, by James Madison’s famous statement in Federalist 51, ‘‘[W]hat is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.’’21 Indeed, the suspicion with which human nature has traditionally been considered has been a bulwark against naive and overly optimistic public policies. Failure to carry on in this tradition has been a source of

Human Dignity

9

much of the anger sometimes felt by the American public toward contemporary liberalism. One of the more famous examples of this disgust occurred in 1988, when Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was criticized for having issued a weekend pass to convicted murderer Willie Horton, who again murdered while on furlough. But jettisoning the low view of human inclinations in favor of the belief in man’s positive plasticity has generally, beyond liberal circles, been held to be a grave mistake. This is fortunate, as the conviction that human nature is dynamic and improvable—and that therefore the social world itself can be remade—turns out to be, ironically, a recipe for human catastrophe. But while it is largely an accepted fact in today’s liberal circles that human nature is a varied and purely social construction, greatly amenable to progress, liberals seem to be unaware of the serious danger inherent in this idea. George Will explains: The idea that human nature has a history—that human beings only have a nature contingent on their time and place—is the idea that has animated modern tyrannies. It has done so because people susceptible to that idea are susceptible to the idea that self-government is a chimera—an impossibility—because the self is a fiction or, at best, a flimsy reflection of the individual’s social setting. To say that human nature is utterly plastic is to open the way to governments that regard the creation of a new, improved form of humanity the highest government project. Such governments are apt to unleash ‘‘consciousness-raisers,’’ who would use political power to extirpate ‘‘false consciousness.’’ Such people insist that, until proper consciousness is made universal, any consent necessarily arises from false consciousness and, hence, is not worth seeking. . . . [Conservatism] warns that people who believe there is no human nature must believe that no rights are natural rights. Indeed, if there is no human nature, then rights are just appetites tarted up in the aggressive language of rights-talk in order to acquire momentum for respect.22

For the purposes of our larger discussion of human dignity, it is also true that the assertion of the malleability of human nature is a dangerous move, for it fails to yield adequate bases and understandings of human worth.

Human Dignity The perfectionistic bent inherent in contemporary liberal thought and its naive confidence in human nature have led to one of the hallmarks of contemporary liberalism: the program. Since the New Deal, and especially the War on Poverty, armies of policy engineers and analysts have been committed to ever more sophisticated solutions to social, po-

10

Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism

litical, and economic problems. Charles Murray captures the sweeping scope of this mentality: Over a period of time from the New Deal through the 1970s, the nation acquired what we have come to call ‘‘social policy,’’ with dozens of constituent elements—welfare programs, educational programs, health programs, job programs, criminal justice programs, and laws, regulations, and Supreme Court decisions involving everything from housing to transportation to employment to child care to abortion. Pick a topic of social concern or even of social interest, and by now a complex body of federal activity constitutes policy, intended to be an active force for good.23

As Murray points out, this activism is well-intentioned, hoping to improve peoples’ quality of life. But many times it fails, often due to analysts’ inattention to the unintended consequences of policies and their latent functions.24 Significantly, the proliferation of programs, even amidst their patent failure, is directly related to contemporary liberalism’s conception of human dignity. This conception is, first and foremost, emotive. It construes human dignity essentially as self-esteem, as having warm and positive feelings about oneself and one’s present station in life. Any policy that enhances these feelings is thought to be an affirmation of human dignity, regardless of how that policy practically performs and actually affects peoples’ lives. To be pleased with oneself, to feel good about oneself, and to insist others display respect toward oneself is to experience and apply the current liberal understanding of individual dignity.25 This ambiguous and unsystematized meaning of human dignity has served policy architects well, for it allows them to use human dignity—a phrase with substantial moral capital, and one everybody wants to support—as an elastic, all-purpose justification for their programs. Indeed, talk of ‘‘human dignity’’ has been used to underwrite the legitimacy of a wide range of liberal public policy initiatives—usually directed at poor people—from welfare programs to job training programs to educational reform to services for unwed mothers.26 This equation of human dignity with self-esteem fits very nicely with the public language of ‘‘rights talk’’ and the cultural ethos of entitlement it fosters, since any desires that can be construed as rights, and publicly represented as such, can easily be enhanced as necessary and integral to one’s dignity. After all, if a self-declared ‘‘right’’ of mine is denied, I can easily perceive this as detrimental to my self-esteem and my selfvaluation, and this ultimately undermines my personal dignity, which is united with my self-esteem. In other words, what I want is important to me, so if it is denied, my sense of personal worth and dignity has been hurt. And of course, the solipsistic nature of this reasoning insulates

Human Dignity

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it from attack, since who can contest that what I assert is essential to my self-esteem is in fact so? In this way, human dignity becomes a do-ityourself endeavor, with definitions varying with the individual or community and the satisfaction of personal wants or group demands becoming constitutive of individual dignity. When rights equal needs (and one’s dignity ), they are not easily denied. So it is that the liberal interest groups that dominate legislative debates and media representations of issues today eagerly present their agenda in ‘‘human rights’’ language, with the trump of ‘‘human dignity’’ close at hand, ready to intimidate dissenters into silence. Thus, for example, Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League will claim that 24-hour waiting periods prior to aborting compromise a woman’s essential reproductive rights, which, it is said, are basic to her autonomous humanity and sense of dignity. Or, likewise, the American Civil Liberties Union may claim that same-sex marriages are a right of gay couples who wish to publicly express their commitment to one another, and if the law withholds this right from them, it is impugning their equal worth as human beings, that is, hurting the selfesteem (feeling of equal worth, dignity) of gay couples who wish to marry. But dignity as self-esteem, although a handy equation for the manipulation of politics and law, is not morally coherent. Besides being a poor definition of dignity, it is completely arbitrary and subjective.27 One person’s self-esteem may be affirmed by feeding bedridden senior citizens; another person’s self-esteem may be affirmed by beating them and looting their homes. Self-esteem, feeling self-satisfied and worthy of the respect of others, is a purely formal category; it is not itself morally weighty. The empty shell of self-esteem can be filled with whatever sound or perverse moral content a given individual wishes to provide, and in its solipsism it is utterly dead to the reality of the human penchant for self-deception and self-righteousness. To say that a person has healthy self-esteem is to say nothing whatever about the quality of their character, the integrity of their self-analysis or their moral life.28 Charles Murray provides an all too frequent example of this reality, recounting that in 1985 a star basketball player in a Chicago high school was walking along the street with his girlfriend and brushed against a youth standing in his path, whereupon the basketball star was shot to death. . . . The brushed against youth’s sense of dignity had been offended. Where would the young man who did the shooting show up on a sociological measure of self esteem? Judging from subsequent newspaper accounts, very high.29

Clearly, inflexibly relating human dignity to a concept like self-esteem, which is wholly amoral and subjective, is a mistake. Contemporary lib-

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Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism

eralism, in its obsession with entitlement without obligation, right without duty, and liberty without judgment, has brought our social life to the absurd point where respecting a person and essentially reckoning him ‘‘dignified’’ is a process completely unrelated to his character and manner of behavior.30 Fundamentally, this incoherence about dignity rises out of modern liberalism’s anthropology. Unable or unwilling to accept the tradition of basic human nature as unchanging and uninvented, it lacks a sound and stable ground on which to found human dignity. Without a static and unwavering core to the human person, there can be no enduring, invariable, and nonrelative residence for human dignity. The fluidity of human nature on the current liberal paradigm, as well as our infatuation with rights, has effectively led liberals to the following backwards conception of the relation of human rights to human dignity: human beings have dignity because they have positive rights and expectations of their fulfillment. But, as we will later see, a more intellectually stable formula is the venerable, traditional conviction that human beings have rights (and duties), of various kinds because they have natural dignity. This is hardly a complicated or offensive idea; so what could account for contemporary liberalism’s practical animus to it? The astute political scientist Francis Canavan has highlighted two main features of contemporary liberalism that help explain how it has come to oppose the historic, Judeo-Christian concept of the priority of human dignity to human rights: the first is relativism, and the second is its obsession over the concept of right itself. The moral relativism of contemporary American life is rife and destructive.31 Canavan succinctly captures this definitional spirit of the age: For multitudes today, truth is only what the individual thinks is true, good is only what the individual personally prefers, and justice is his right to act on his preferences, so long as they are compatible with the equal right of others to do the same. . . . Liberalism, which we may credit with beginning its career as the political philosophy of freedom, has blossomed into mere permissiveness, and is now a menace rather than a support of constitutional democracy.32

The moral relativism ascendant today renders impossible the recognition of a transpersonal, transcultural, and transhistorical human dignity, and the objective ethical obligations it enjoins upon people, since moral claims can always be trumped as subjective. This hyper-subjective ethic has powerfully abetted—perhaps even defined—liberalism’s devolution from its classic form into its contemporary condition: a relativistic, rights-centered creed that has insulated itself from criticism. Liberalism has done this by construing every criticism of

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13

it as a malevolent attack on its most cherished idea and ideological polestar: rights. Any suggestion from critics of liberalism that liberty unordered to a higher end is self-defeating, or that a constantly expanding body of rights is socially and personally unhealthy, is regarded as prima facie invalid and misguided by the modern liberal mind. ‘‘Rights uber alles,’’ is the anthem of contemporary liberalism, and not even human dignity—since it inevitably implies rights-constraining duties and obligations—can conceptually precede this god. Canavan elaborates on liberalism’s enthroning of rights by presenting an editorial from nothing less than the once leading organ and apologist of contemporary liberalism, The New Republic: Contemporary liberalism is so intellectually and psychologically invested in the doctrine of ever-expanding rights—the rights of privacy, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the rights of pornographers, the rights of everyone to everything—that any suggestions of the baleful consequences of that doctrine appears to them as a threat to the liberal idea itself.33

‘‘The liberal idea itself’’ is a telling phrase, for it suggests that this idea—human liberty, unfettered by tradition or duty of any sort—is the summum bonum. In Chapter 2 we will evaluate the coherence of liberalism’s prioritizing of the right over the good, but at this point we should note in passing that this ordering prevents liberalism from recognizing any human telos other than naked liberty. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, We have been told that it is moral to satisfy our ‘‘wants’’ and ‘‘needs,’’ but we are no longer sure what our wants and needs are or should be. After all, ‘‘wants’’ are but individual preferences. Americans, as is often contended, are good people or at least want to be good people, but our problem is that we have lost any idea of what that could possibly mean. We have made ‘‘freedom of the individual’’ an end in itself and have ignored the fact that most of us do not have the slightest idea of what we should do with our freedom.34

Neither human life, the common good, nor virtue for its own sake can serve as justifying reasons for circumscribing personal liberty. Yet this unhitching of freedom from ultimate values is suicidal for freedom, as it inevitably diminishes the scope and efficacy of freedom itself.35 For, as liberalism, especially since the 1960s, has been so slow to recognize, freedom and license are not one and the same. Freedom is more than simply the maximization of behavioral options in any given context. As a concept, it implies the deliberate action of purposive moral agents, which is to say, it presupposes a sound, substantive reason or telos for action. Selfgratification, for its own sake, doing something because it feels good or

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simply because it is possible, is a rather low view of human freedom, one that features human beings as little more than physical mechanisms of pleasure and opportunity, or, in the dehumanizing words of that icon of contemporary liberal sensibilities, Phil Donahue, ‘‘the human animal.’’36 So, ironically, contemporary liberalism—which has understood itself to be emancipatory and thus in its view serving the best interest of people (freedom)—has in fact been undercutting and corrupting their freedom by absolutizing it. Furthermore, it has been the prime ideological mover in dehumanizing people by reducing them to mere choosers of options, individual and isolated pursuers of wants and desires often uncritically construed as needs. In rejecting an unconstructed human nature, rights-based liberalism has removed any solid foundation for intrinsically valuing people—that is, regarding them not for what they have (rights) or what they can do (choose), but for what they are (human persons). And in its substitution of formal, value-free self-esteem for intrinsic, natural dignity founded in human identity, contemporary liberalism has trivialized and minimized the general concept of human dignity and its import. TWO TYPES OF HUMAN DIGNITY This trivialization is partly the product of the new liberalism’s abiding discomfort with immutability and unalterable realities, especially with regard to human beings. As we remarked earlier, the contemporary liberal mind shares the anthropological optimism of the Enlightenment, an optimism now greatly exaggerated and magnified as it has been filtered through the ‘‘Great Society’’ mentality and the self-righteous, activist statism of elites such as Hillary Rodham Clinton.37 Today’s liberalism is essentially subjectivist, deeply addicted to ‘‘change’’ in man, and inveterately inclined to reliance on government as the main engine of social ‘‘improvement.’’ Since contemporary liberalism is not at all convinced the human being is going to remain substantially the way he is or has been, and since it conceives of man as a fabrication of history and culture, it has had no need to articulate a comprehensive understanding of his basic absolute features, including his inherent dignity.38 Ironically, although our rights-soaked age features many passing references to human dignity and the dignity of individual persons, and although many political movements across the ideological spectrum have participated in asserting the reality and high value of human dignity, it is not as common as one might think it would be to find extended, sensitive contemporary reflections on the subject.39 As we here consider the place of human dignity in social life and political theory, it would be helpful to broadly draw a distinction be-

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tween two general types of human dignity and their respective meanings. I would suggest that thinking of human dignity as being both intrinsic and extrinsic to the person helps coherently organize analysis of the idea.40 Intrinsic Dignity To speak of human dignity as intrinsic to persons is to speak of human dignity in its most traditional, Judeo-Christian sense. This dignity or worth that is intrinsic is unearned, unmanufactured, and unmaintained. Like an involuntary bodily function such as the heartbeat, it simply occurs naturally, by design, without any thought or effort being devoted to it by the individual who possesses it. In addition, being intrinsic to the human individual, this dignity is universal to humanity, which is to say everyone has it; it is not reserved just for the specially virtuous. This is a significant point, because it means that the bad and the good, the evil and the virtuous, each possess this manner of dignity equally. That being the case, it would seem that this kind of dignity is unrelated to what we think about certain persons, whether or not we like them, whether or not we think they deserve it, whether or not they are decent, whether or not they are brilliant. But do the bad and the good, the genius and the imbecile, possess intrinsic dignity in equal amounts? It would seem that they do, for if this property is natural and universal, and if it is wholly unrelated to individual behavior or physical state, it must be constitutive of human identity itself, which is to say that it essentially goes along with being human and is independent of everything except human essence. Just as to own a car is to own four tires and a steering wheel along with the other features and equipment that comprise the vehicle, so to be human is to be in possession of this intrinsic value.41 Furthermore, this type of human dignity is an absolute value. It cannot be possessed only partially or fractionally by someone.42 Rather, it is wholly and permanently present within every human being. So we might summarize the nature of this type of human dignity with this statement: All human beings, as such, have full, equal, and constant intrinsic human dignity, regardless of any other considerations or claims. This is the core of the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of human dignity which has been so influential in Western civilization. The human being, made in the image of God for union with God, the object of God’s attention in the creation, incarnation, and atonement, and endowed with capacities to creatively exercise liberty and responsibility under the regime of well-formed conscience, is the ontologically unique vessel characterized by intrinsic dignity.43 This is an intuitively satisfying concept, for it confirms our sense that human beings are utterly unlike other crea-

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tures, that there is an unmistakably unique gravity inherent in human lives, and that the belittling of this aura is morally wrong.44 But the intrinsic, unqualified dignity of the human person is certainly not, at the end of the twentieth century, a fully accepted proposition. Indeed, the general cultural lack of regard for the value of human life today is due in large part to a lack of respect for intrinsic human dignity. An assortment of political and philosophical movements since the 1960s have been in the vanguard of inciting diminished valuation of human life and dignity. We will have an opportunity later in this chapter to discuss in detail major philosophical causes of the contemporary devaluation of human life. At this point I would simply assert that the following three broad social/intellectual trends have been influential in the last half of this century in undermining the view that man is uniquely and intrinsically valuable: an aggressive and absolutist animal rights and environmentalist rights advocacy; the determinist, behaviorist psychology classically enunciated by B. F. Skinner; and a tendency from various quarters to recommend functional definitions of human personhood.45 But this is not to say that certain contemporary organizations and movements are not committed to the genuine defense of human dignity. London-based Amnesty International, which has had some success in monitoring and exposing basic human rights abuses across the globe, and the United Nations with its seminal 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are two notable examples.46 Similarly, the pro-life movement in the United States is rooted in regard for the inherent value of all human life, even if it is unwanted or thought to be inconvenient.47 But without question, the morally leveling and homogenizing tides of contemporary liberalism have washed from the general public mind an abiding consciousness of all human life as qualitatively extraordinary and inviolable.48 Extrinsic Dignity The dehumanizing social consequences of a lack of recognition for the intrinsic dignity of man are exacerbated by a similar deficit of understanding in the contemporary American mind of extrinsic human dignity. This type of dignity is not essential to the human person but rather contingent. Different people possess this dignity to different extents, depending on their mentality and conduct. The idea of extrinsic dignity helps us to draw distinctions between people and to some extent characterologically assess them as people. This, of course, is anathema to the modern liberal, whose moral egalitarianism cannot tolerate this kind of discriminating public judgment. Nonetheless, in our daily lives we do

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make judgments about people and situations, and so recognize that sometimes dignity (of the extrinsic type) is present, and sometimes not. For example, we sense and acknowledge that the libertine is not as dignified as the morally upright person; the thief is not as dignified as the honest man; the slothful man is not as dignified in his inactivity as the diligent person in his legitimate work; the loud, rude fellow who cuts in line is not as dignified as the courteous, patient gentleman. We commonly use a whole host of phrases to describe this type of dignity, what we might think of as ‘‘the dignity of everyday life,’’ or ‘‘practical dignity.’’ For example, we might describe someone as having a ‘‘dignified air,’’ ‘‘carrying himself with dignity,’’ doing ‘‘dignified work,’’ ‘‘dignifying’’ an unpleasant task by doing it responsibly and well, gaining a personal ‘‘sense of dignity’’ by finding a job or overcoming hardship, being generally ‘‘dignified’’ or handling a difficult situation ‘‘with dignity.’’ In these contexts, the word ‘‘dignity’’ denotes a certain respect, admiration, civility, and virtue. We might also speak of a ceremony or atmosphere, or even a building or clothes, as ‘‘dignified.’’ Here the concept of dignity is deployed as a compliment and salute, an affirmation that the object—and its human creator—has recognized and honored the gravity of the human dimension of the situation, the seriousness of the context to the human psyche. In all such cases, the basic, overarching context for dignity is behavioral. Extrinsic dignity is fundamentally behavioral, while intrinsic dignity is theoretical. Extrinsic dignity can be outwardly apparent, while intrinsic dignity remains unseen. Extrinsic dignity is the practice that rises from the idea of intrinsic dignity. Extrinsic dignity is conditional on the fulfillment of certain rules, norms, or expectations, but the intrinsic is completely unconditional. Extrinsic dignity is an index to personal character, revealing what a person values and believes. It is earned. Intrinsic dignity inheres in the human person per se, regardless of what that individual is like, and is unearned. Extrinsic dignity can be mimicked by a noble animal or object. In such cases, this apparent dignity is an allusion to extrinsic human dignity and its intrinsic foundation. It is a testimony to the human-like character of the animal or object. Intrinsic dignity cannot be echoed in the visage or conduct of any object or creature. It is radically confined to the human person; it is that essence that serves to ontologically differentiate the human from nonhuman being. Extrinsic dignity has some historical and cultural relativity, as customs, norms, and decorum may differ from time to time and place to place. Intrinsic dignity is independent of culture, ethics, and time. It is objective to all human social, cultural, and moral constructions, while extrinsic dignity may in part be defined by them. Extrinsic dignity is derived from intrinsic dignity and is a tangible

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manifestation of it. Just as fire, though unseen, causes smoke that indicates its presence, so intrinsic dignity can give rise to attitudes and behaviors that we esteem as dignified (extrinsic dignity). So, while every human being has identical intrinsic dignity, they do not have extrinsic dignity in equal amounts, or, even, necessarily, at all. Indeed, there is a sense in which authentic extrinsic dignity, which I maintain implies a certain virtue, can be counterfeited. For example, Adolf Hitler, in neatly pressed uniform and military regalia, may have outwardly appeared dignified in the sense of respectable and important, yet since inwardly he was thoroughly evil and corrupt, he did not manifest an authentic extrinsic dignity. He may have projected airs of importance, but as with Saddam Hussein and other tyrants, the respect he commanded from others was given more out of fear and zealous participation in evil than from a recognition of intrinsic human dignity being outwardly manifested.49 In contemporary American life, the politically correct imperative to be ‘‘tolerant’’ and ‘‘nonjudgmental’’ often means that the ability and willingness to evaluate individual behavior, and so perceive and acknowledge the external manifestation of intrinsic dignity, is lost. The death of shame in our time has hampered our ability to recognize extrinsic dignity, since the deplorable and the respectable have largely merged as categories of human conduct. Our moral aphasia and moral egalitarianism—born of contemporary liberalism’s peculiar understandings of tolerance, compassion, and fairness—have undercut our moral literacy, our ethical acuity. We have been desensitized to the sometimes subtle demonstrations of dignified behavior, unappreciative of the admirable habits formed by practical wisdom. Indeed, even to assert that there are such things as admirable habits strikes a chord very dissonant with the contemporary American zeitgeist. But if we are unable to discern and acknowledge the distinctively good (an inability that is partially a consequence of being unwilling to name the bad)—whether culturally, morally, artistically, or otherwise—we are unable to recognize and salute extrinsic human dignity, which is nothing less than the best we have to offer one another. This ethical stultification quickly leads to an impoverishment of civic and intellectual life, and a cresting nihilism as people, particularly youth, search for meaning in their lives. Indeed, the American mood of today, especially among youth, has been convincingly portrayed as deeply nihilistic.50 How has contemporary liberalism brought us to this despairing point where genuine human dignity is merely equated with feeling good about oneself, and, although the crowning reality of humanity itself, all but unrecognizable amidst today’s cacophony of equal values and endless rights claims?

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OUR DEGRADATION OF HUMAN LIFE: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS The degraded conception of human beings and human dignity that dominates contemporary liberalism is not a random occurrence. Rather, it is rooted in the intellectual mood of the time, a mood that is decisively postmodernist, or, perhaps a better word is ‘‘hypermodernist.’’51 In an effort to better understand why the new liberalism conceives of people and their value the way it does, we will take a critical measure of the postmodern mood, a mental outlook that has become in some ways the philosophical pet of contemporary liberalism and American intellectual life.52 Postmodernism Any meaningfully specific definition of postmodernism is not strictly possible, since the movement itself admits of no firm definitions. Any ‘‘definition’’ of postmodernism must—because of the nature of postmodernism itself—be provisional and incomplete. Having said that, we must make clear one beginning point: though a vague notion, postmodernism has arisen and become prominent because of the collapse and apparent impotence of modernity as an omnicompetent social and intellectual explanation of human history. Deep cultural divisions, incommensurate politics, and the horrors of the twentieth century, seared into the modern consciousness by the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau, have for many people relativized the authority of reason to provide a competent morality and a universally valid understanding of man and the world. The randomness of violent crime, economic precariousness, and contemporary religious bodies that seem unable to provide meaning for living have all led some people to question the viability of grand unifying theories, meta-narratives explaining basic questions.53 Into this existential vertigo has come postmodernism, with its deliberate avoidance of meta-narratives and pretensions toward comprehensive explanation. While a concise summary of what postmodernism means is not attainable, some general features can be delineated.54 Prominent postmodernist writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard argue that language is basically arbitrary and whimsical, and not the product of any categorically valid, overarching linguistic laws. Human language is unavoidably contextual, and its meaning community-specific. Essentially it only entrenches and perpetuates the belief systems—and the power—of those who create it and superintend its use. Thus, to put it in postmodernist terms, the signifier has supplanted the signified, the expression the expressed, as the center of value and orientation. Meaning is bestowed by the critic rather than

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received from the speaker or author, subjectively presented rather than objectively exegeted. The aspect of postmodernism that most clearly evidences this idea is deconstruction, the method of literary criticism that holds that the author’s identity and personal intentions are not relevant to the interpretation of what she has written and that, in any case, essentially no monolithic ‘‘meaning’’ is to be exegeted from any text. Indeed, as Paul de Man, a leading American deconstructionist has confidently announced, the very idea of ‘‘meaning’’ smacks of fascism.55 This is a common view among postmodernist or poststructuralist critics: attempts at objective meaning are essentially immoral and ought to be eschewed out of moral duty and civility. All interpretations have equal standing, and no one perspective is to be privileged above any other.56 Thus, postmodernism is a ‘‘world without opposites.’’ The drive—so prominent in modernism—toward bifurcation and dichotomization, dualism and polarization, is transcended in postmodernism. In the postmodern world distinctions have been broken down, unmasked as the social constructions and language games they are. The result is an incredulity toward meta-narratives that lay claim to describing the ‘‘Truth,’’ and the demise of what is seen as the modernist, technological myth of the unity of knowledge.57 Postmodernism lacks the modernist idea of the concentricity of circles of truth, each oriented toward an objective center, opting instead to see the world in terms of discrete, plural centers and personalized truth, eschewing confidence in universal, trans-historical truth. So for the postmodernist there can be no grand meaning to history, no teleological development to human experience. Tradition, too, is bereft of any great landmark or epicenter, being instead a purely human— and often noxious—creation from the disconnected phenomena of random history. The modernist tendency to turn to some metaphysical idea of a continuous thread of human reason passing throughout history, somehow indicative of a great Transcendental Subject, is seen by the postmodernist as a Procrustean reading of history, not a justifiable deduction from human experience. It is but another interpretation of human being and human experience, a vain positing of a mythic continuity. The following comparative list serves as a helpful shorthand for contrasting modernity and postmodernism:58 Modern

Postmodern

Rationalistic science

Alienation from objective knowledge; chaos theory

Static human nature

No human nature; dynamic possibilities of remaking self

Purpose

Play

Human Dignity Design

Chance

Centering Technology

Dispersal Ecology

Virtue possible

Virtue person-relative; not an important idea anyway

General morality

No general morality

Cold war

Breakup of empires; rise of societies rooted in nationalism

Belief in general truth, capable of abstract or scientific statement

Skepticism; reign of personal truths

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Obviously then, postmodernism itself is not a good candidate for an omni-explanatory point of view. To regard it as such would be a plain contradiction of the most basic premises of postmodernism. It is inherently limited in its explanatory power. Postmodernism’s project is literally ‘‘deconstructive’’; it is a potent analytical tool for critical analysis, but it is not so easily able to fill the voids it creates. It is able to say ‘‘no,’’ but it is unable to say ‘‘yes’’ in any general way. The postmodern lack of commitment to rational, analytical consistency—something it would see as an artifact of a discredited, totalistic modernist view of the world—disables it from speaking transpersonally. In such an arrangement, the center of meaning has multiplied according to the plurality of individuals. There is no longer one locus of meaning and truth, to which one’s thinking and being either corresponds or does not correspond. There are many centers of meaning, each an equally legitimate focus among the many personal human foci. Different people make different decisions about values, lifestyle, and moral duty, and these decisions are not arbitrable in any linguistic or socioculturally independent, objective way. All choices must be left on an equal plane of veridicality. What then are we to say of the internal consistency and plausibility of postmodernism’s theses and of its implications for human valuation? First, we must stress the obvious: postmodernism, as relativism, focuses on subjectivity. But it fails to observe that a belief, however strong, in the reality and importance of subjectivity does not by itself automatically negate the existence of objectivity or obviate the need to consider the possibility of an underlying objective reality. The mere variability of perception about values does not itself endorse a complete skepticism toward objectivity. The absence of consensus does not necessarily require a conclusion of complete subjectivity. After all, some epistemological actors may be cognitively wrong. If we did not all believe this to be the case, we would never argue with one another about knowledge or values, but instead we would let mental solipsism and simple personal taste

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completely reign. Some things we are convinced we know, whether or not another person seems to share our knowledge or agree with us. It would seem to be a foregone conclusion that any intellectual inquiry or dialogue would have to begin by acknowledging that differences in perception do not necessarily mean different objects are being perceived. Nor do these differences necessarily mean that all differences in perception of a single object are of equal intellectual coherence and veridical validity. Stipulating one’s subjectivity and taking inventory of the various relationships and contexts that generate this subjectivity is not equivalent to demonstrating the subjectivity of objects of perception. Nor is it tantamount to settling the question of whether or not one’s perceptions of objects could possibly be mistaken in their conclusions. The official apotheosis of subjectivity is a mistake that inheres in postmodernist analyses and contemporary liberalism as an intellectual posture—although both inconsistently speak in a normative voice when preaching sexual liberty, ‘‘choice,’’ ‘‘tolerance,’’ and other cardinal virtues of political correctness. Yet they fail to see that complete and total subjectivity prevents any interpersonally authoritative conclusions whatsoever, and it insulates us from valuable criticisms external to ourselves, since there will always be recourse to the trump ‘‘That’s just your perspective’’—a tool that liberals use selectively to counter the claims of traditional values. This extreme subjectivism is inevitably self-refuting, foreclosing on the possibility of employing public argumentative criteria and the very trans-personal distinctions it needs to sustain its own critique of objectivity. Disparaging value-claims such as ‘‘That’s just your opinion’’ rather than openly debating those assertions does not sustain subjectivity, since ‘‘That’s just your opinion’’ is itself a private opinion, and therefore is not relevant to anyone beyond oneself. It is selfreferentially incoherent.59 The ultimate consequence of this incoherence is, unavoidably, nihilism, and so we see in American life today the existential nihilism of secular contemporary liberalism and the cognitive nihilism of postmodernism. Postmodernism and any effort at radical and complete subjectivization encounters another problem: to make positive statements, to criticize, and even to think intelligibly, one must operate according to certain formalities. A particular concept is one thing and not another, an assertion or conclusion is either true and coherent or not, and any idea cannot be both true and false, either substantively (if plain facts are available) or syllogistically. These are the laws of human thought (the principles of identity, excluded middle, and noncontradiction, respectively). They are not aligned with any particular ideology.60 They are the cognitive building blocks of verbal communication and straight thinking. It is simply not possible to evaluate ideas without them. They are the very minimal conditions of coherence. So the postmodern critic himself must inevitably

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play by the cognitive rules of classical philosophy, in clearly differentiating the concepts of his own perspective and that perspective from all others. Pure subjectivity in language or method will not permit the articulation of subjectivity in substantive questions of value and ideas. What protection then exists for the dignity of the human person under the regime of postmodernism and the ethos of contemporary liberalism which it helps sustain? Lacking any thick theory of the good, any stable unconstructed understanding of what it means to be human, and any hope for knowing truth itself, the hypermodern posture has nothing to offer the human being except an ever-changing packet of socially conferred rights and entitlements. But this is surely a foundation of shifting sand, since rights that are purely socially generated and bestowed can be, with equal decisiveness, socially destroyed and revoked. Of course, this has happened before in human history, and in American history as well. For example, in the middle of the last century (in the Dred Scott case of 1857), the United States Supreme Court decided that black people were bereft of any rights that white people had to observe, and a century later in what was arguably at that time the most intellectually sophisticated nation on earth, an entire minority was declared subhuman and their lives became, by law, lebensunwertes Leben—lives unworthy of life. More than a century after Dred Scott, in the Roe v. Wade case of 1973, the United States Supreme Court incoherently ruled that an entire class of human beings were non-persons.61 The deconstruction of natural rights and the abolition of categorical truth—or its possibility—never conduce to the benefit of the whole human community. Inevitably, some minority, ethnic, cognitive, religious, or developmental, is marginalized and reviled as ‘‘vermin’’ or ‘‘unwanted.’’ While in this country today the excesses of contemporary liberalism have not issued in general bigotry similar to Nazi persecution, the construction of our public life on the ambient sociocultural forces constitutive of contemporary liberalism (radical egalitarianism, hyper-individualism, and the accompanying antitraditionalism and relativism), will only ensure instability and insecurity for human life. Despite its obsession with rights, our elite secular liberal culture, both political and legal—with its twin foci of relativism and leftward political partisanship—ironically undermines the most fundamental of rights, the right to live, and through its encroaching statism subtly withdraws other rights disfavored by the egalitarian and governmentally authoritarian character of modern liberalism.62 As the relativizing work of contemporary liberalism proceeds apace, the Judeo-Christian moral capital of American culture increasingly weakens, drained of the ideological substance and values of which it consists, and on which American life ultimately rests. This does not bode well for the future welfare of the human community as a whole.

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Egoism The mood of contemporary liberalism and its entrenchment in this country is further aided by the egoism that it and postmodernism inevitably produce. This is, of course, paradoxical, since contemporary liberalism exercises such lofty expectations for the virtuous reformation of human nature. But the fact is that postmodernism’s pure subjectivity— that is, its renunciation of transpersonal language and truth—along with the rights-based mentality of today’s liberalism only leaves us to do what we personally believe are in our own best interests. Thus, a supreme ethic of selfish private interest—masquerading as liberty—has arisen as a result today, and the unremittingly selfish language of ‘‘rights’’ and ‘‘choice’’ is its expression. But again, as with postmodernism, egoism is self-refuting and incoherent on its own terms. First, we must understand that the egoist has not privatized the egoistic idea of action and judgment. The egoist could do this and recommend altruism to others, and thereby perhaps best serve his own welfare. But in so doing, he is not adopting a principle of personal or social ethics, because if one takes a maxim as a moral principle, one must be ready to universalize it.63 So we understand the egoist as advocating that everyone should behave so as to best serve their own long-run advantage. Some would say that egoism, so understood, is selfcontradictory because it cannot be to one person’s advantage that everyone pursue their own advantage with equal vigor. But this does not necessarily render egoism contradictory, if it is possible for the advantage of one person to coincide with the advantage of all others.64 If this were true, egoism could be universalized. The idea of a harmonic and orderly world, however, is clearly not realistic. That this is true is self evident. One look at the morning newspaper shows that people, consumed by their desire for self-advancement, do not get along. The preestablished world harmony that a universalized egoism postulates is very hard to prove and patently unbelievable.65 Egoism involves a basic conflict of human wills and cannot be sustained as a moral theory. Egoism cannot realistically serve as a basis for good judgment and sound moral direction.66 But even beyond this significant, fundamental moral impotence, egoistic theory is guilty of an internal contradiction of the first order. As G. E. Moore trenchantly points out: The only reason I can have for aiming at ‘‘my own good’’ is that it is good absolutely that what I so call should belong to me—good absolutely that I should have something, which, if I have it, others cannot have. But if it is good absolutely that I should have it, then everyone else has as much reason for aiming at my having it, as I have myself. If, therefore, it is true

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of any single man’s ‘‘interest’’ or ‘‘happiness’’ that it ought to be his sole ultimate end, this can only mean that that man’s ‘‘interest’’ or ‘‘happiness’’ is the sole good, the Universal Good, and the only thing that anybody ought to aim at. What Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man’s happiness is the sole good—that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is—an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.67

This irrationality of egoism would seem to preclude it from practical use today, but such is far from the case. Indeed, the contemporary American decline into a nation of self-interested and hyper-individuated autonomous selves indiscriminately exercising ‘‘freedom,’’ has been hastened by the very widespread employment of egoism.68 Rationality is hard work; hence the irrationality of selfishness is more attractive. This simple fact, as well as the febrile commitment to axiological relativism seen in postmodernism and the overarching anti-intellectualism displayed by modern liberalism as a movement, all combine to render the lure of egoism—to which we are naturally disposed anyway—irresistible. Even so, egoism as a behavior cannot see past its own nose. In its selfishness it is incapable of offering cogent moral direction and judgment. When this reality starts to deeply concern more of the general public, and especially the elites in the ‘‘intellectual’’ professions and chattering class—since they are most infected by the subjectivist and selfregarding germs of contemporary liberalism—our decline will slow, and we will be in a cultural position to rightly value and protect human dignity. William Sullivan, in Reconstructing Public Philosophy, argues forcefully that the protection of human dignity depends on the moral quality of social relationships, and that this is ultimately a public and political concern.69 Today’s liberal outlook on human dignity, human relationships, and society has ignored this truth and consequently corrupted the moral quality of our lives together. The result is modern liberalism’s hollow logorrhia of personal rights and respect. It is a discourse void of genuine and uncompromising regard for the intrinsic dignity of all human life (whatever its condition), and an ethic largely unprepared to apply basic—and essential—moral distinctions to everyday life. NOTES 1. For a short history of human rights and contemporary understandings, as well as commentary on significant recent formulations, see Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 1–17. See also, generally, Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977); John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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1986); Louis Henken, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 2. Joel Feinberg, ‘‘Duties, Rights and Claims,’’ American Philosophical Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1966): 8. 3. This same point is also tellingly made by R. G. Frey in his book, Rights, Killing and Suffering (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 43–44. Frey highlights the fact that ‘‘Moral rights have become the fashionable terms of contemporary moral debate, and one interest group after another has moved to formulate its position in terms of them. The reason is obvious: to fail to cast its wants in terms of rights and so to fail to place itself in a position to demand its due is to disadvantage itself in this debate vis-a`-vis other groups which show no such reluctance. And what group is prepared to do that?’’ 4. Glendon, Rights Talk, p. x. 5. Ibid., pp. x, 14. As Professor Glendon’s discussion suggests, our rightscentered public language, with its inherent proliferation of personal entitlement, is in no small part responsible for the stultification of social discourse that has led to the intractability of the ‘‘culture wars’’ with which American society is so wracked. For clear delineation of the battlegrounds in these conflicts, see James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars (New York: The Free Press, 1994). 6. Throughout this book I will differentiate between the terms contemporary liberalism (a.k.a. modern liberalism) and classical liberalism (a.k.a. traditional liberalism). 7. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 5. 8. Sociologist Robert Bellah and his collaborators have documented the moral aphasia that the consequent ‘‘expressive individualism,’’ ‘‘utilitarian individualism’’ and other manifestations of the contemporary liberal ethos have instanced in American life. See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). For a provocative discussion of the extent and harmfulness of unbridled judicial activism, see the symposium, ‘‘The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,’’ First Things, November 1996, pp. 18–42 and ‘‘The End of Democracy? A Discussion Continued,’’ First Things, January 1991, pp. 19–28. 9. See generally, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: The Free Press, 1991); Glendon, Rights Talk; Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Ronald D. Rotunda, The Politics of Language (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1986); Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). As some of these writers and many critics of the new liberalism have pointed

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out, the present social hegemony of the liberal creed is in no small part protected and advanced by the obscurantist and quasireligious devotion of its adherents, generally highly educated people influentially positioned in elite culture. The following remarks by Norman Podhoretz, the long-time editor-in-chief (now editor-at-large) of Commentary magazine, effectively portray this emphatic allegiance: ‘‘[The arts, media, universities, entertainment, and mainstream churches] is a world inhabited and controlled by people whose attachment to the liberal creed has proved at least as unshakable as the religious faith of the most fervent fundamentalist. Indeed, for all their trumpeted devotion to ‘pluralism,’ the culturati could give the Christian Coalition a lesson or two in intolerance of other points of view. . . . Moreover, not since the Stalinists of the 30’s have we seen a political faction so slavish as the liberal culturati have been in following every new twist in their party’s line, even if it represents a 180–degree turn—say, from the principle of individual merit to the principle of group entitlement, or from the anathematization of genetic theories where intelligence is concerned to the sanctification of genetic theories in the case of homosexuality. No wonder, then, that the culturati have responded to the growing power of their conservative adversaries in the political realm by digging in ever more deeply in the territories they continue to occupy, by consolidating their control over those territories, and by using them as staging areas for ideological attacks on the enemy’s ideas and attitudes.’’ Norman Podhoretz, ‘‘Liberalism and the Culture: A Turning of the Tide?,’’ Commentary, October 1996, pp. 25–32. 10. See Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, p. 271, for the identification of classical liberalism as ‘‘laissez-faire liberalism.’’ Sandel designates contemporary liberalism as ‘‘procedural’’ in nature. See Part I of Democracy’s Discontent. For detailed discussion of the philosophical derivation of the liberal tradition, see the works of John Gray: Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1989). 11. Admittedly, typologies of this sort can never be complete and fully satisfactory. The conceptual waters become a bit murky here as well, since, as with liberalism, two main strands of conservative thought are prevalent today, paleoconservatism and neoconservatism, neither one of which is strictly identical to the description of classical liberalism I’ve provided. [Generally representative works of paleoconservatism are Russel Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 7th ed. (Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986) and Samuel Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993). Helpful discussion of other key figures of this line of conservatism is found in John P. East, The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders (Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986). Generally representative works of neoconservatism are Robert Nisbet, Conservatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995). Important analyses of neoconservatism’s substantial political influence are Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, Md: Madison Books, 1996), Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1979), Paul Gottfied and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative Movement (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), and Mark Royden Winchell, Neoconservative Criticism (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991)].

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Nevertheless, the aforementioned profile of paleoconservatism’s foundational ideas is substantially shared by neoconservatism, augmented by, I would suggest, a greatly heightened concern with community and the institutions that form it; a recognition of the value of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition as a source of social cohesion; and an emphasis on democratic capitalism as an engine for socioeconomic mobility, minority empowerment, and urban renewal. The conventional bifurcation of conservatism between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives is complicated by the rising influence of conservatives speaking in an explicitly religious voice. For discussion of this trend, see Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘‘Neocon v. Theocon,’’ in The New Republic, December 30, 1996, pp. 20–24 and Michael Novak, Robert George, and Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘‘Neocon v. Theocon: An Exchange,’’ in The New Republic, February 3, 1997, pp. 28–29. For remarks on the unique difficulties faced in constructing complete typologies of conservative political thought, see Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 366–367. Importantly, as communitarian critics of liberalism (both in its classical and contemporary form), neoconservatives are by no means ideologically unique. The critique of neoconservative writers such as Peter Berger, Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Robert Nisbet has been partly echoed from the left by writers who are likewise communitarian critics of classical liberalism—and even much of contemporary liberalism. The work of Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and in many ways Christopher Lasch protests, with the neoconservatives, the centrifugal, socially atomizing thrust of liberalism, especially the modern type. As an alternative to liberal theory altogether, the civic republican political tradition (which, like communitarianism cuts across the political spectrum) has been a central consideration for the last quarter of this century. For general presentations of the civic republican tradition and its dissent from the liberal paradigm, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); and William Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). See also the bibliographical references of Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 540–542. 12. Bork sees contemporary liberalism as the creation of a complex confluence of factors. He holds that classical liberalism, with its heavy accent on liberty and equality as values, has always borne within itself the seeds of its own devolution into its modern perversion. But for most of this country’s history there were bulwarks against this degeneration, specifically a vigorous, traditional Christian religious practice; the dominance of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition; a body of law closely hewn to the constitutional principles of the Founders; and the simple reality of hard work as a prerequisite for economic survival. (See Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 7–9.) Throughout the convulsions of the twentieth century (World War I, the Great Depression, World War II), these realities prevailed. But with the onset of remarkable affluence in the 1950s, and the concomitant boredom, along with the technologizing of life and the overweening

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valuing of personal convenience it brings, Americans grew impatient with the religious, moral, and legal traditions that circumscribed their lives and their now energized pursuit of self-gratification (Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 9). This tide, joined with the swelling influence of intellectuals and literati, collided with the socialistic student radicals and national upheavals of the 1960s (the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Vietnam), settling in the antibourgeois, nihilistic, hedonistic, and collectivist configuration recognized today as contemporary liberalism. Valuable, brief reviews of Slouching Towards Gomorrah include Todd Lindberg, ‘‘Borking the Culture,’’ The Weekly Standard, October 21, 1996, pp. 34–36; John Leo, ‘‘In the Matter of the Court v. Us,’’ U. S. News and World Report, October 7, 1996, p. 28; and Don Feder, ‘‘Bork’s Book an Antidote to Cultural Poison,’’ The Orange County Register, September 8, 1996, p. Commentary 3. 13. Interestingly, some who identify themselves as ‘‘liberals’’ would not subscribe to all of this partial resume of liberalism. Yet, they persist in identifying themselves as liberals. This indicates, I would suggest, a definite, palpable social pressure to be liberal. For discussion of the general phenomenon of ‘‘preference falsification’’—claiming to hold a position one does not actually hold and publicly praising views one privately knows to be false—see Timur Kuran, ‘‘Private and Public Preferences,’’ Economics and Philosophy 6 (1990): 1–26, and especially, Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Standard critiques of contemporary liberalism documenting the tendencies and values I have described include: William Bennett, The De-Valuing of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah; Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); D’Souza, Illiberal Education, and The End of Racism (New York: The Free Press, 1995); Glendon, Rights Talk; William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (New York: Warner Books, 1994); Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, eds., Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness (Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1994); Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993); Charles Murray, Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1984); Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1992); Dennis Prager, Think a Second Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 14. See Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, particularly Chapters 1 and 2, for basic outlines of the mindset and op-

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erating methods of those politicians, policy-makers, and bureaucrats who justify their positions on the basis of their own surety of their superior motives. 15. James Carville, We’re Right, They’re Not! (New York: Random House, 1995). 16. This is illustrated by the helpful survey edited by Leslie Stevenson, The Study of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), as well as Leslie Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). For a comprehensive discussion of human nature and its expression in the human person, see James B. Reichmann, Philosophy of the Human Person (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985). 17. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: William Morrow, 1987), Part I. 18. Ibid., p. 24. 19. Ibid., pp. 26, 31, 33–34. 20. Obviously, the literature discussing the Judeo-Christian anthropology is far too extensive to document here in any thorough way. Some useful sources for concise statements on various aspects of the general tradition include: Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther, trans. by Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972); Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1952); Richard M. Gula, Reason Informed by Faith (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1989); Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966); Wayne A. Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964); and Bernard Ramm, An Offense to Reason (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). On the relationship of human nature to virtue and its cultivation, see the informative discussion by Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 121–125. 21. James Madison, ‘‘The Federalist No. 51,’’ in The Federalist, edited by Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 349. 22. George F. Will, ‘‘The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism,’’ The Public Interest, no. 123, Spring 1996, p. 46. Eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson concurs with Will’s basic assessment, writing: ‘‘If man is infinitely malleable, he is as much at risk from the despotisms of this world as he would be if he were entirely shaped by some biochemical process. The anthropologist Robin Fox has put the matter well: If, indeed, everything is learned, then surely men can be taught to live in any kind of society. Man is at the mercy of all the tyrants . . . who think they know what is best for him. And how can he plead that they are being inhuman if he doesn’t know what being human is in the first place?’’ James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 250–251. For further elaboration on the significance of the mistake of denying human nature, see the discursus by Mortimer Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 156–166. For a creative and thoughtful presentation of the case for a universal, unchanging human nature, see Sidney Callahan, In Good Conscience: Reason and Emotion in Moral Decision Making (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 177–182.

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23. Charles Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government (San Francisco: ICS Press edition, 1994), p. 4. 24. See Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, pp. 7–30, for the common pattern of response, or, on Sowell’s analysis, nonresponse, of policy engineers to programmatic failure. 25. For an excellent discussion on these themes, see Chapter 6, ‘‘Dignity, SelfEsteem, and Self-Respect,’’ in Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, pp. 83–99. For a discussion of the ironically negative effects in education which the cultural emphasis on self-esteem has wrought, see Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 243–244, 251, 253. 26. Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, p. 83. 27. We will advance a sound understanding of dignity later in this chapter. 28. Murray draws a valuable distinction between self-esteem and self-respect, the latter implying a self-responsibility and accountability for behavior which the former lacks. See Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, pp. 87– 89. On the importance of distinguishing between self-esteem and self-respect, see also Anne Taylor Fleming, ‘‘The Importance of Earning Respect,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1997, p. B9. Indeed, regarding the presence of high self-esteem within a person, I would suggest that this is more usually an index of pride and self-obsession rather than of individual virtue. Humility, modesty, selflessness, service to others, these are traits and habits we commonly construe as virtuous, and which, in my view, are not at all promoted or enhanced by heavy emphasis on self-esteem. 29. Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, p. 86. Such events are more common than one might think. In Atlanta a 13-year-old suspect will be tried as an adult for murder because he shot a man three times in the chest— while the man’s children watched in horror—because the youth felt the man had not been adequately respectful toward him. See ‘‘Crime and Punishment,’’ World, March 1, 1997, p. 10. 30. See Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, p. 98, for a slightly different statement of this same conclusion. For an excellent discussion arguing against the ‘‘right’’ of respect, see Robert A. Licht, ‘‘Respect Is not a Right,’’ Crisis, July/August 1993, pp. 41–47. 31. On liberal relativism, see the bibliographical references critical of modern liberalism in note 13 above. For an interesting discussion of this general issue, see S. D. Gaede, When Tolerance Is No Virtue (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1993). 32. Francis Canavan, The Pluralist Game (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), p. 133. 33. Ibid., pp. 133–134, quoting an editorial in The New Republic, February 8, 1988. 34. Hauerwas, A Community of Character, p. 80. 35. See Pope John Paul II’s tenth encyclical, ‘‘Veritatis Splendor’’ for the full unfolding of this principle. Concise commentary on the encyclical is provided by Richard John Neuhaus in ‘‘The Truth about Freedom,’’ The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 1993, p. A12. On the natural unity of freedom and virtue, see also the reflections of Doug Bandow, ‘‘Freedom and Virtue Are Inseparable,’’ The Orange County Register, January 29, 1997, p. Metro 7.

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36. Phil Donahue, The Human Animal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). For an insightful and compelling discussion of the consonance of individual freedom with the common good, and the application of self-interest rightly understood, see Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good (Lanham, Md: Madison Books, 1989), esp. Chapter 2. 37. Her book It Takes a Village (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), is indicative of the activist statism advocated and practiced by today’s liberalism. 38. This was not always the case. As John Hallowell has pointed out, the original liberalism of the seventeenth century, what he calls ‘‘integral liberalism,’’ embraced the inherent moral worth and individual dignity of the human person, autonomous and rational. Man’s value was seen as socially transcendent and independent of the vicissitudes of social convention and construction, and discernible as such through human reason and conscience. Hence, this ‘‘integral liberalism,’’ whose ideological heirs are today—though diffused—clearly distributed to the right of center on the political spectrum, did feature a stable and objective understanding of human dignity. See John Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971). Contemporary liberalism, in its emphasis on dignity as socially conferred through legal rights and personally determined through self-valuation, and in its philosophical abrogation of an objective foundation for human dignity, does not very well cohere with its philosophical ancestor. For commentary on Hallowell’s work, and an excellent synopsis of liberalism’s transformation from its classic to contemporary form, see Canavan, The Pluralist Game, pp. 115–122. For discussion on contemporary liberalism’s often incoherent use of the concept of human dignity, deploying it as a trope intended to compel public respect for unconventional ‘‘lifestyle’’ choices, see Licht, ‘‘Respect Is not a Right.’’ 39. Some notable exceptions include Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 122–123; Tibor Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995), esp. pp. 61–101; Jurgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity, trans.by M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); John Warwick Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986); Stephen Charles Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 43–58; Murray, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, pp. 83–100; Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good, and The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1993); J. I. Packer and Thomas Howard, Christianity: The True Humanism (Waco, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1985), pp. 135–160; and Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 40. A similar distinction, termed ‘‘appraised’’ and ‘‘bestowed’’ dignity, is found in Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 157. Outka’s model is discussed in Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change, pp. 46–47. See also Licht, ‘‘Respect Is not a Right,’’ pp. 42–43. 41. This presupposes that humanity and personhood are identical. Definitions of personhood are beyond the scope of this study, but accepting all humans as persons strikes me as the most humane and reasonable option, and most consistent with the view of human dignity being limned here. For general discussion on definitions of personhood, see Norman Ford, When Did I Begin? Conception of

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the Human Individual in History, Philosophy and Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Michael F. Goodman, ed., What Is a Person? (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1988). We will again address this issue in Chapter 3. 42. The objection that someone who is partially human can be partially intrinsically dignified depends on the intelligibility of the concept of ‘‘partial humanness.’’ The coherence of that idea will be addressed in Part II, while considering abortion. 43. Theological derivations of this general principle, from a variety of perspectives, can be found in Ray S. Anderson, On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1982); Nigel M. de S. Cameron, The New Medicine (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1997), pp. 172–174; National Catholic Welfare Conference, ‘‘A Statement on Man’s Dignity,’’ in David M. Byers, ed., Justice in the Marketplace (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1985); Anthony Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1986); National Council of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1986); Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity, pp. 189–218; Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1, Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964); Packer and Howard, Christianity: The True Humanism, pp. 139–160; Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1995), Veritatis Splendor (Washington, D.C.: Catholic News Service, 1993) and Centessimus Annus (Vatican City: Vatican Library, 1991); Robert L. Saucy, ‘‘Theology of Human Nature,’’ in J. P. Moreland and David M. Ciocchi, eds., Christian Perspectives on Being Human (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1993), pp. 17–51. R. C. Sproul has simply summarized the general Christian grounding of human dignity: ‘‘It is because God has assigned worth to man and woman that human dignity is established. Man’s glory is derived, dependent on God’s glory for his own. It is because mankind bears the image of God that he enjoys such an exalted rank in the nature of things. From his creation to his redemption, man’s dignity is preserved. He is created by One who is eternal and is made for a redemption which stretches into eternity. His origin is significant—his destiny is significant—he is significant.’’ R. C. Sproul, In Search of Dignity (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1983), pp. 98–99. See also ‘‘The Basis for Human Dignity,’’ in Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1979), pp. 121–158, for discussion of the Judeo-Christian grounding of human dignity. It is important to note that the religiously particularistic nature of the Christian grounding of human dignity—while certainly a definite truth-claim and one that should be rigorously investigated—can be bracketed for the present sociological purposes of comparing and analyzing types and understandings of human dignity. One need not accept its literal truthfulness to recognize that it has been our most influential tradition of thought about human dignity, and, in its own right, a valuable and humane way of understanding human beings. Human dignity articulated in this religiously particularistic way can still serve as an ordering concept for contemporary civic and social life, and it compares well with alternative models. The fact that it currently does not function as a civicly unifying theory is not itself sufficient ground for deeming the Christian architectonic of

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human dignity anachronistic or retrograde. Religious particularity itself is not a theoretically disqualifying factor if, as I suggest, a normative verdict on that particularity can be suspended for the purposes of public philosophy and reflection. For discussion on the justification for such a ‘‘methodological agnosticism,’’ see Peter Berger, An Invitation to Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1963) and The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 44. The aura of significance attaching to human beings is recognized through, for example, the covering of dead bodies with a sheet, certain funeral rituals, and the occasional respect accorded the site of a loved one’s or venerated figure’s death. This realization of the sui generis importance of human life was exemplified in the burial service arranged for two newborn infants who separately washed up on the shores of Orange County, California, beaches in March 1995. The newborn infants had been abandoned just hours after their births, thrown into the ocean. Father Patrick Callahan of St. Matthew American Catholic Church in Orange, California, arranged the service. Explaining why he did so, he said, ‘‘I really feel it would be unfortunate for these children to be just cremated and placed in a common grave as if they never existed. . . . There should be some awareness that they were here, even though they only lived for a brief period of time, maybe only a matter of hours. . . . I think [the memorial service] is the respectful thing to do. It celebrates the dignity of children.’’ ‘‘A Dignified Goodby to Two Abandoned Infants,’’ Los Angeles Times, (Orange County Edition), July 16, 1995, p. B3. Obviously, however, it is tragically true that mankind is able, all too easily, to break through the knowledge of innate, universal human dignity and mistreat his fellows. The record of history is clear: human dignity, unprotected by statute and disrespected by custom, is easily trampled under the ruthless wheels of bigotry, pride, violence, and selfishness. In an important sense, the awareness of human dignity is similar to what many writers have asserted to be the innate human knowledge and experience of a Creator. In this context, sociologist Peter Berger developed the idea of ‘‘signals of transcendence,’’ that is, ideas and phenomena—like the human religious impulse and, I would suggest, human dignity—that point beyond natural, human reality to a transcendent realm. For Berger’s development of the notion of ‘‘signals of transcendence,’’ see his book, A Rumor of Angels (New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 52–54. For a unique discussion on the relation of intrinsic dignity to contemporary social life, particularly with regard to the concept of honor, see Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 84–91, and Peter Berger, ‘‘On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,’’ in Stanley Hauerwas and Alisdair MacIntyre, eds., Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 172–181. 45. On animal rights and environmentalists generally, see Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 272, 282, 298; James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), Chapters 2 and 3; Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (New York: Penguin, 1992); Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Howard, The Death of Common Sense; Thomas B. Littlewood, The Politics of Population Control (Notre Dame, Ind.: University

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of Notre Dame Press, 1977); Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology:The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992); and William Salomone, Earth and Its People: How Can We Prosper? A Response to Al Gore (New York: Carlton Press, 1994). The antihuman and atavistic nature of some such advocates is well-illustrated by the following quote, from animal rights activist John Aspinall, who said: ‘‘I must say that I am among that group of people who, to borrow an expression from Teddy Goldsmith, would regard a demo-catastrophe as an eco-bonanza. In other words, I would be very happy to see three and one-half billion humans wiped from the face of the earth within the next 150 or 200 years and I am quite prepared to go myself with this majority. Most of you [reading this] are redundant in every possible sense of the word. . . . I would just remind you of Professor Revie’s famous article in the Scientific American, in which he described the increase of man’s population from one million years ago, when he estimated the world population of human beings at 100,000 . . . to a time after the discovery of fire, when the figures started to soar to today’s four billion. If that is not redundancy, if that is not a burden of unnecessary bio-mass, then I don’t know what is! Let us all look forward to the day when the catastrophe strikes us down! With what resounding applause would the rest of nature greet our demise!’’ John Aspinall, ‘‘Man’s Place in Nature,’’ in David Peterson and Richard D. Ryder, eds., Animals’ Rights—A Symposium (London: Centaur, 1979), quoted in Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity, pp. 18–19. For analysis of animal rights advocates’ outlook on human life, see Cal Thomas, ‘‘Animal Rights Claque Targets Human Life,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1997, p. B9. For a brief and concise debunking of overpopulation myths, see Steven Mosher, ‘‘Too Many People? Not by a Long Shot,’’ The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1997, p. A18. On Skinnerian behaviorism and its deterministic anthropology, see, first, seminal works of Skinner: B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971); Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953); Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1969); About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974). See also these critiques: Tibor Machan, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974); Sidney Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind: A Symposium (New York: New York University Press, 1960); and Francis A. Schaeffer, Back to Freedom and Dignity (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1972). For a brief discussion of the social influence of Skinner’s ideas, see Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions, pp. 63–65. Functional definitions of personhood—that is, a definition of humanity or the person which makes such status contingent on action, potential for action, or valuation by others rather than on simply being—come from a very wide range of sources. Some influential ones include: Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Edd Doerr and James W. Prescott, eds., Abortion Rights and Fetal ‘‘Personhood’’ (Long Beach, Calif.: Centerline Press, 1989); Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Beverly Wildung Harrison, Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1985); and Lloyd Steffen, ed., Abortion: A Reader (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1996). 46. For an example of Amnesty International’s documentation of atrocities, see its publication Torture in the Eighties (New York: Amnesty International, 1984). A useful survey of Amnesty International’s philosophy and work is Jonathan Power, Amnesty International: The Human Rights Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). For the full text of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see appendix one in Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity. 47. For a general background discussion on the abortion conflict in America, see Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars. For a collection of politically and religiously diverse pro-life arguments, illustrating the humanistic concerns of the movement, see David Mall, ed., When Life and Choice Collide: Essays on Rhetoric and Abortion (Libertyville, Ill.: Kairos Books, 1994, Vol. 1 of To Set the Dawn Free), and Brad Stetson, ed., The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996). 48. Any doubt as to the low regard with which human life is commonly held in American society should be dispelled by these facts: since 1960 violent crime has increased 560 percent; since 1960 the rate of teen suicide has risen by more than 200 percent; since 1960 the rate of homicide deaths for children younger than age 19 has more than quadrupled; from 1990 to 1994 more than twice the number of people were murdered in the United States (119,732) than died in the Vietnam War (58,000); abortions are at the rate of approximately 1.5 million per year, with about 40 percent being obtained by women who have already had at least one abortion. For documentation of these and reams of similar statistics, see William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) and William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count (New York: Simon and Schuster 1996). Although homicide rates have recently decreased in many major urban areas, this decrease cannot plausibly be attributed to greater respect for human life. Rather, increased police activity in violent communities is a more apparent cause for the abatement. For discussion on the decline of murder rates in some cities, see ‘‘Several Major Cities Had Murder Decline,’’ Orange County Register, January 1, 1997, p. News 20, and ‘‘U.S. Violent Crime Drops Record 7%,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1997, p. A1. Indeed, it is widely anticipated that serious crime such as homicide is likely to increase in the near future. For discussion of this anticipated trend, see Body Count, pp. 26–34; John J. DiIulio, Jr., ‘‘The Coming of the Super-Predators,’’ The Weekly Standard, November 27, 1995, pp. 23–28 and DiIulio, ‘‘How to Defuse the Youth Crime Bomb,’’ The Weekly Standard, March 10, 1997. See also the articles by John J. DiIulio, Jr.: ‘‘The Question of Black Crime,’’ The Public Interest, No. 117, Fall 1994, pp. 3–56 and ‘‘My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,’’ City Journal, Spring 1996, pp. 14–28 for discussion of how future crime trends will uniquely terrorize urban black communities. 49. For general discussion of Hitler’s personal dealings and the diplomatic respect unfortunately accorded him, see A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 2nd ed. (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1961). 50. See Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 125–126, 192, 276. Indeed, the shocking prevalence of teen suicide in America today is an index

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to the nihilistic currents defining popular culture. While in communities across the country, school counselors, teachers, and parents have all responded with diligence and deep concern when their towns or schools are stunned by a childsuicide, seldom is it wondered aloud if these bewildering and numbing events can be explained, in part at least, through reflection on the cultural forces ascendant today. It is a rather stunning fact that the rate of teen suicide in this country has more than tripled since 1960. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among American adolescents—this, in the wealthiest, best educated, most technologically advanced and privileged society in the world. Why is this happening? Any social explanation can only be partial, for each case is unique and an element of the inexplicable always seems to be present in such epic tragedies. Furthermore, we must admit that in moments of anguish and despair cultural and political recriminations come easy: Newt Gingrich faulted the Democrats for the child murders committed by Susan Smith, and Bill Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. Still, we are not without some objective knowledge about the tides of our corporate life. It is part of our social history that the last thirty years have seen a radical shift in the moral ethos and self-understanding of the American individual. The cultural critique of the left—with its heavy accent on personal autonomy and suspicion of authority—has decisively altered the avenues of self-formation in American life. In postmodern America, meaning-making is very much a do-ityourself enterprise, detached from the moorings of previously embedded traditional religious and ethical convictions. Although progressives and liberals frequently deride as ‘‘oppressive’’ the cultural framework of moral norms, behavioral expectations, and social conventions that conditioned American life from the end of World War II to the sixties, this was an authority that served the practical purpose of placing teenagers—often given to instability and insecurity— under the regime of a nurturing discipline that functioned as a caretaker until they were mature enough to rationally deliberate about their own future, values, and worldview. Adult, professional elites may revel in the antinomian effects of the leftist critique of middle-class values, but for youth the murky worldview and moral relativism that often ensue is stressful and discouraging. They can become anti-life, submerging themselves in dark music, dark moods, and a general rebellion that makes romantic fantasies of punishing peers and parents by ‘‘ending it all’’ seem attractive. This is not to suggest cynically that liberalism causes children to kill themselves. Rather, it is to recall us to the sobering reality that changes in the macrostructure of society inevitably filter down to alter the microstructure of individual life-attitudes, often in a negative direction. Those of the left, possessed as they are of an unconstrained optimism about human institutions and human capacities, often fail to see this. And it is young people, being at a stage of psycho-emotional development where they are very sensitive to cues from their social milieu, who are most exposed to the unsettledness that this antirealism brings. Children, especially teenagers, need a solid framework of behavioral guidelines and rules in their lives—even though they may deny they do. Contemporary liberalism’s resolute unwillingness to publicly affirm a rudimentary vision

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of the good life and fundamental values to live by—coupled with its decisive portrayal of old-fashioned mores as unenlightened and intolerant—can contribute to a deep sense of anomie and a pervasive feeling of nonattachment among some young people. Drifting toward nihilism and meaninglessness, they wonder ‘‘Why does it matter how I act?’’ An unsatisfying answer to this question can quickly evaporate the will to live in teens who may have isolated themselves from family, friends, and any close association. The deconstructive tides of the American left have emancipated many teens from traditional values; yet these young people are not sufficiently developed psychologically or intellectually to manage this unencumbered ‘‘freedom.’’ They find that liberty unordered by any ultimate ends or limits brings on an existential vertigo, a maelstrom of confusion that makes it hard for them to see purpose to their lives. Of course, the searing social and personal tragedy that is teen suicide is not new. But the frequency of it is, and if we do not honestly consider the possibility that our efforts at social engineering generate psychologically debilitating cultural messages for some youth, we risk continuing to reap this harvest of grief that is the most profound failure of any civilization. For discussion of teen suicide and its increasing frequency, see ‘‘Children Who Kill Themselves: A Grim Trend,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1997, p. A1. 51. Richard John Neuhaus has suggested ‘‘hypermodern’’ as a preferable phrase for the complex of ideas and assumptions often described as ‘‘postmodern.’’ See Richard John Neuhaus, ‘‘The Empty Creche,’’ National Review, December 31, 1996, p. 29. I will use ‘‘postmodern’’ and ‘‘hypermodern’’ interchangeably, though I will primarily use ‘‘postmodern,’’ as it is the current practice. For helpful discussion of the definitions and relationships of modernist and postmodernist intellectuals, see Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 500–504. 52. For an examination of the more recent academic, cultural, and social influence of postmodernist thinking, see Cheney, Telling the Truth, esp. pp. 87ff. Some portions of the following discussion of postmodernism are drawn from Chapter 3 of Brad Stetson, Pluralism and Particularity in Religious Belief (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1994). The first part of that chapter, the first part of a reprint of that chapter in Criswell Theological Review (7:2), and part of the discussion here are patterned after the fine treatment of Alistair E. McGrath, ‘‘The Challenge of Pluralism for the Contemporary Christian Church,’’ Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 35, no. 3 (September 1992): 361–374. Inadvertently, this acknowledgment was omitted from Chapter 3 of Pluralism and Particularity in Religious Belief. McGrath has expanded his analysis of postmodernism in Chapter 4 of his book A Passion for Truth (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996). 53. On the impotence of much of mainline Christianity, specifically, to provide stable life-foundations for parishioners, see Thomas Reeves, The Empty Church (New York: The Free Press, 1996). For discussion of myriad ways in which contemporary life has impacted human consciousness and contributed to a general and pervasive sense of displacement, ambiguity, and restlessness, see Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. 54. A useful—if tongue in cheek—aphoristic summary of the meaning of postmodernism is provided by James Byrne: ‘‘Descartes, Kant, epistemology, ontol-

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ogy, meaning, the signified and the subject are ‘out’; Nietzsche, Derrida, discourse, the text, the trope, the signifier and grammar are ‘in’ .’’ See James Byrne, ‘‘Foucault on Continuity: The Challenge to Tradition,’’ Faith and Philosophy 9, no. 3 (July 1992): 335. The following works provide a general understanding of the main analytical thrusts of postmodernism: Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1990); Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1992); Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1989); John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991; John Murphy, Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); See John McGowan’s clear delineation of postmodern theory’s most prominent schools and argumentative thrusts, in his book Postmodernism and Its Critics, pp. ix–xi. Important to understanding the argumentative thrust of postmodernism is the work of Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. See Horkheimer’s seminal essay contrasting traditional and critical theory, ‘‘Traditional and Critical Theory,’’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. by Matthew J. O’Connel and others (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 188–243. See also John O’Neill, ed., On Critical Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1976) for a helpful collection of essays on Horkheimer and critical theory. 55. Presumably then, de Man does not intend any particular—and therefore fascistic—meaning by that assertion. All ironies aside, postmodernism clearly has a problem with the self-referential applications of its own radical subjectivization. This will be a topic of discussion later in this section. With specific reference to de Man, this insistent discounting of static and unequivocal meaning became an occasion for great embarrassment—both to him and the deconstructionist movement to which his work is so central—when, in 1989, the New York Times reported the discovery of de Man’s anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi writings, penned while in Belgian exile in 1941 and 1942. (See Peter Shaw, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction,’’ Commentary, 92, no. 6 [December 1991]: 50–53, for a description of this episode.) Neither de Man nor his defenders in academia could claim that de Man actually meant something other than the impression left by the articles, given the axiomatic status of the fallacy of authorial intention in deconstructionist criticism. After all, what the author really thought was not relevant. In addition, de Man could not be acquitted by appeal to his historical circumstances, since an author’s actual and historical existence is not pertinent to analysis of his text. The very premises of postmodernism itself left no room for de Man or his apologists to construct his defense. This episode pictures in little the way in which the postmodern attitude—which claims to enhance human life through emancipation from moral constructions and sociocultural artifacts—in fact threatens human life by exposing it to the chilling vicissitudes of total relativism. 56. For a useful analysis of this critical style, see David Lehman, Signs of the Times (London: Andre Deutsch Publishers, 1991). 57. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

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trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. ix. 58. This chart is based on a similar device in Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., The Sixties Spiritual Awakening (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994 ) and McGrath, A Passion for Truth, p. 185. 59. The debunking project of postmodernism—and the anti-Judeo-Christian selective moralism of politically correct contemporary liberalism—do not understand themselves to be engaged merely in some kind of giant exercise in intellectual tail-chasing. They employ intuited values, both positive and negative (e.g., the wrongness of repression and hypocrisy, the rightness of freedom, and, in the case of postmodernism, honesty about the human condition). This employment of moral values shatters postmodernism’s—and contemporary liberalism’s—theoretical pretensions to Archimedian critique, or any posture that would claim to be immune from the constructionist attack. As horrifying as its advocates may find it, the Foucaultian, postmodernist critique of knowledge/power and the moralizing of today’s liberalism (e.g., affirmative action, ‘‘choice,’’ gay rights, etc.) are parochial (though unsystematic) visions of the Good, laden with assumptions about the human being—his constitution, telos, and duties. This moral particularity is widely unacknowledged by partisans of these positions, since they wish to retain the social and political capital they accrue by asserting their own ‘‘tolerance’’ and ‘‘open-mindedness.’’ Certainly, the contemporary American zeitgeist, especially in academe, is wholly hospitable to the critical orientation of postmodernism and the politics of contemporary liberalism. The historic iconoclasm of higher education—which today seems to be heightened to such an extent that novelty and activistic antagonism toward bourgeoisie America seem to be the main criteria of what constitutes ‘‘good work’’—has been a context within which the critiques brought by postmodernism and modern liberalism have flourished. For an insightful discussion of the growing favor accorded heretofore novel fields of study, see Jerry Z. Muller, ‘‘Coming Out Ahead: The Homosexual Moment in the Academy,’’ First Things, no. 35 August/September 1993): 17–24. The postmodernist view of the state of knowledge and the academy in the Western world is found in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. For critical discussion of Lyotard’s views in this regard, see Barry Smith, ed., European Philosophy and the American Academy (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1994). 60. This is not an uncontested point in some quarters. Such logical laws are sometimes faulted as ‘‘logocentric,’’ and biased against affectivity and nondiscursive reflection. But, of course, even such a criticism makes use of noncontradiction by asserting a definite difference between the two perspectives, as well as a discursive, rational argumentation. For discussion of uniquely female epistemologies, see Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986) and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). For criticism of this general idea, see Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), Chapter 4. 61. As Robert Bork has succinctly put it, ‘‘Whatever one’s feelings about abortion, [Roe v. Wade] has no constitutional foundation, and [in it] the court offered no constitutional reasoning. Roe is nothing more than the decision of a Court

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majority to enlist on one side of the culture war.’’ Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 103. For analysis of the politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court and the law in general, see Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1990). For further criticism of the reasoning of Roe, see Francis Beckwith, Politically Correct Death (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1993); John Hart Ely, ‘‘The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,’’ Yale Law Journal 82 (1973); Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); David Mall, ed., When Life and Choice Collide, vol. 1 of the series To Set the Dawn Free (Libertyville, Ill.: Kairos Books, 1994); John T. Noonan, A Private Choice (New York: The Free Press, 1979); and Tom Poundstone, ‘‘Supreme Court Jurisprudence and Prenatal Life,’’ in Stetson, ed., The Silent Subject. A defense of the Roe decision is found in Laurence Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 62. See Bovard, Lost Rights, for extensive discussion of the rights of independence, association, speech, and property eroded by liberal activist statism. On the loss of property rights specifically, see James V. DeLong, Property Matters (New York: The Free Press, 1997). 63. William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p.18. My discussion of egoism is informed by Frankena’s coverage in Ethics, particularly pp. 15–22. For defenses of ethical egoism, see Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964) and Tibor Machan, Individuals and Their Rights and Capitalism and Individualism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 64. Frankena, Ethics, p. 19. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 67. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 99. Given such an emphatic theoretical defeat, how can we account for egoism’s historic and contemporary appeal? Much of egoism’s roots can be found in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679). Though neither an egoist nor a hedonist himself, Hobbes nonetheless held self-interest to be the basis of social duty. His Leviathan (1651) was widely influential in seventeenth-century England. In it he advocated an absolute sovereignty by the ruler in order to ensure social security . Hobbes based all morality on the decisions of the sovereign power, and the citizenry was in self-preservational submission to his authority. This paramount regard for self-interest is the key basis for egoistic action. Yet in terms of personal action or social ideology, selfconcern apart from immutable moral standards has historically had disastrous results. Hitler, the paragon of evil, could claim that he was acting in his own best interests when he took 6 million Jewish lives. If the only grounds one has for disapproving his actions is self-interest, then we have no basis of arbitration. Egoistic theory, as subjectivity, cannot affirm the guilt of someone like Hitler, only his choice. In terms of egoism vis-a`-vis social morality, the Playboy philosophy of the sixties and seventies can be seen to be largely synonymous with egoism. Yet the Playboy philosophy—and its descendant, the heightened sexual liberty of today—has not produced the social freedom and happiness many thought it

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would. Instead, modern society features rampant child abuse and violent pornography, the dehumanization of women, and epidemic social diseases. Indeed, in the eighties and nineties the Playboy philosophy lived-out could be fatal. While it is true that ethical egoism is not the sole culprit of all these problems, it has largely provided the ethical foundation and moral impetus for their rise. The theory’s stubborn persistence is testimony to the naked power of selfishness over the human being. For classic discussion of the social consequences of insufficient cultural awareness of man’s intransigent selfishness, see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). 68. See Sullivan, Reconstucting Public Philosophy, pp. 72ff, for discussion of how liberal individualism strongly inclines toward egoism, and how historically liberal philosophy, through the utilitarian and social contract traditions, has attempted, obviously unsuccessfully, to inspire citizens to rise above raw selfishness. 69. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy, p. 22. See Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good, esp. Chapter 5, for a comprehensive meditation on the possibilities of merging self-interest, rightly understood, with concern for the general social welfare, and so forging a truly morally reflective political culture and society substantially capable of sustaining a genuinely high regard for human dignity.

2 THE IMPORTANCE OF DESERT We shall turn from the soft vices in which a civilization decays, we shall return to the stern virtues by which a civilization is made, we shall do this because, at long last, we know that we must, because finally we begin to see that the hard way is the only enduring way. —Walter Lippmann

Having surveyed the disrepair of the contemporary liberal mind—seen in its anthropological optimism, misapprehension of human dignity, and captivity to the meaningless, relativist thrall of postmodernism—we are now in a position to focus more tightly on a concept I contend is equally central to modern liberalism’s dysfunction, and one that if reconstructed from its current misunderstanding could serve a restorative function in our public life. This is the concept of desert, or deservingness.1

DESERT In many ways the idea of desert is out of fashion today. The relativist ethos of our culture and the primacy of equality as a socially organizing value have made it difficult to speak of merit or desert, for this is an idea that inherently differentiates people from one another. Desert introduces categories and a hierarchy of condition to life, and this is anathema to the morally leveling spirit of today’s liberalism. To think in terms of desert means to designate some people as diligent and successful at having met the conditions of desert, and some not; some talented in a certain way, and some not; some personally responsible, and some not; some worthy of reward, and some unworthy. This is not a direction of contemplation comfortable to an ideology averse to behavioral distinc-

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tions. Contemporary liberalism, of course, is not averse to distinctions based on race, gender, and class, but it is comparatively uninterested in differences centering on behavioral qualities. In an important way, desert is a basic element of our natural moral sense and an ethical touchstone we rely on in our daily lives. It is an important tool of moral analysis that we readily employ, believing it to be a valid arbitrative device. Generally speaking, human beings manifest a sense of justice and fairness, an ethical compass not wholly—or perhaps even substantially—dependent on socialization and culture. While certainly an element of social construction is present, and while certainly moral particularities can vary with time and place, human beings think in moral terms without having been trained, instructed, or cued to do so.2 While the acuity of this sense is more comprehensive and developed in some individuals than in others—and more cultivated by some societies than by others—everyone, especially children, seem to have an innate objection to inequity and unfairness.3 We want to see people receive what is rightly theirs, and when they do not, or when they receive what they do not deserve, we believe an offense has occurred, justice has not been done, and some manner of effective and fair rectification is in order. We certainly feel this way when we ourselves are the victims of inequity. So we feel the claims of both positive and negative desert, and are aggrieved when they are not met. Under the auspices of contemporary liberalism during the last half of this century, one of the major public outrages has been the lenient treatment afforded violent criminals.4 With a dominant penology that privileges rehabilitation over punishment, understanding over anger, and compassion over blame, contemporary liberalism—steered by professional policy-makers, knowledge-class elites, and litigious interest groups—has again alienated the common sensibilities of much of the general public. Modern liberalism and its sentinels have never really understood the desire of the public to see those people who are guilty of crimes, especially violent assaults on the innocent, receive their just deserts of severe punishment. Today’s liberalism tends to chide such reactions as ‘‘vigilantism’’ and ‘‘mean-spirited’’ right-wing hysteria, sometimes claiming a surreptitious racism on the part of those calling for stiffer penalties.5 Yet, it would seem reasonable to assert that morally mature people naturally feel a sense of outrage and moral anger at deeds of great evil. Genocide, murder, gratuitous and systematic torture, deliberate and purposive betrayal of pure trust, and hypocrisy are all deeds that morally responsible persons find not simply immoral, but revolting. Our sometimes visceral reactions to these heinous, intentional actions reflect the presence inside us of a strong sense of desert. People should get what they deserve. We demand retribution for great wrongdoing; that is, the

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perpetrators of moral crimes ought to, in some tangible, meaningful way, pay for having so chosen to act. They should be punished for what they have done. While the specific prescription for retribution may vary widely, there is present still the understanding that intrinsic human dignity—possessed by both the perpetrator(s) and victim(s) of crimes—as well as simple justice require a penalty for egregious ethical transgressions. The innocent should not be allowed to be violated or destroyed with impunity by assailants. This is a point tellingly echoed by Peter Berger when he writes: There are deeds that demand not only condemnation, but damnation in the full religious meaning of the word—that is, the doer not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human. . . . The massacre of the innocent . . . suggests the necessity of hell—not so much as a confirmation of God’s justice, but rather as a vindication of our own.6

Berger is suggesting that some deeds, or strings of deeds, are so vile, so heinous, and so essentially evil as to merit and justly require nothing less than damnation to meet the demands of the human—not to mention divine—sense of fairness. Desert must be observed. Holding persons genuinely and proportionally accountable for their free actions is a primary intuition of human moral awareness, and is required if one is truly to respect free human agency and autonomy. So desert as a concept is primary to the human moral experience and is a good candidate for a focus of any deliberation concerning the conditions of justice and the proper inferences about social organization to be drawn from the realities of human constitution and human dignity. Rawls Almost since the advent of contemporary liberalism’s political hegemony in American culture, a reign that we might date from the effective sacking of the elite universities by student radicals during the mid1960s,7 the polestar of discussions about desert and material entitlement has been John Rawls’s 1971 monument, A Theory of Justice.8 It therefore merits extended discussion here. After alluding to some key themes of Rawls’s singularly influential theory of justice and its pivotal conception of the human person, we will advance an alternative, skeletal communitarian understanding of the substance of the person through discussion of central Rawlsean themes, all with an eye toward accurately understanding the nature of desert.

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It is not an overstatement to credit Rawls with having singlehandedly defined the agenda of contemporary political theory.9 His reckoning of justice as fairness and the tools he employs in his deliberations about the conditions of fair social organization largely embody the culturally pervasive spirit of contemporary liberalism, and so serve as a valuable focus of study.10 A centerpiece of Rawls’s approach is to place individuals in the ‘‘original position’’ behind a ‘‘veil of ignorance,’’ where they are unaware of their talents, abilities, socioeconomic standing, specific interests, and anything that differentiates them from others. Persons behind the veil are free, rational, and self-concerned, but lack individualized tastes and interests. The parties in this position do have particular conceptions of the good, but they do not actually know the substance of these conceptions; they only know that they value certain primary social goods, such as rights, liberties, opportunities and powers, income, and wealth.11 Rawls postulates two principles that he asserts rational contractors in the original position would consensually adopt.12 The first principle maintains that each person should have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. The second principle holds that inequalities of all kinds should be arranged so as to benefit the least advantaged. It is this ‘‘difference principle’’ which is his primary instrument of distributive justice. Rawls’s view of social justice is grounded in the questionable idea that human beings in their social role are mainly disinterested, calculating individuals. He assumes that individuals logically precede any social belonging or sense of prior relatedness. But this liberal assumption works to isolate individuals and strip them of the social ties and historical lineaments that lend meaning to the very kind of social contract Rawls is postulating. Importantly, as we will see later, in the Rawlsean archetectonic, the fittingness of the radically autonomous, independent choosing self of contemporary liberalism is clearly assumed. I would suggest, however, that as an ethical heuristic Rawls’s portrayal does not authentically and comprehensively account for true human experience and the means by which individual persons actually deliberate. As Richard John Neuhaus has pointed out, Rawls’s theory, though apparently mindful of the individual, in fact eclipses the individual by depriving him of the personal particularities that are constitutive of individuality. Behind Rawls’s veil, genuine humanity recedes, and those situated there are in fact nonpersons.13 Larry Churchill explains: Not only is the Rawlsean contract a hypothetical agreement that never happened, it is an agreement which could only be made by persons who never existed and never could exist. . . . The hypothetical nature of the contract removes it from history, but more importantly, the mono-dimensional

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contracting agents are not fulsome persons with whom we can identify, but logical constructs which we can merely apprehend as rational ideal types. We never were, nor will we ever be, stripped of the particularities of place, social role, and circumstance because these are not mere accidental attachments to our essential . . . nature. The historical particularities are us; they are the way we find our identity at all, and they require a social ambiance which is given rather than wholly chosen by acts of will.14

Rawls and the Identity of Persons What then does it mean to be a person? In what does individual, constant human identity consist? The contemporary scholarly debate over the nature of the person has been formed largely around the conceptions presented in A Theory of Justice and the many responses to it. Rawls, the social liberal, and his communitarian critics have argued for mutually exclusive notions of human constitution, with Rawls claiming that people are essentially formal satisfiers of wants and preferences, and his various critics countering, in different ways, that people are more thickly constituted, only fully comprehensible in terms of their social selves.15 These two polar general conceptions have perdured for two decades. Echoing the Rawlsean understanding have been various authors, including Richard Rorty, Bruce Ackerman, Will Kymlicka, and Ronald Dworkin.16 Articulating versions of a more substantial definition of the self have been writers like Michael Sandel, William Sullivan, Mary Ann Glendon, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor.17 Between them, these two positions have functioned as the major anthropological presuppositions for both liberal and conservative politics in post–Vietnam America, and they have jointly limned the dominant conceptions of the self and individual identity which have undergirded a wide range of deliberations about the nature of the human person. Only a description of the human self that consciously focuses on human dignity—its meaning and implications for public life—is able to forge a viable public passageway through the labyrinth of conflicting political values and cultural histories, a path open to all citizens of goodwill, regardless of their ultimate values. The rudimentary philosophy of human identity I will outline contains three elements. Each of these elements seems indispensable to the human self and is indicative of the sui generis gravity that inheres in being human. It should be noted, however, that they are not intended to be a comprehensive description of human identity, but rather only a statement of some necessary and universal aspects of personhood. That is, people are, and have, at least these aspects and quite possibly additional features. The first piece of this triune anthropology is a view of the self as in some general sense partly constituted by the relationships it has with

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others. This is the essential communitarian idea that has been developed in some detail by Michael Sandel, Alisdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Novak, Amitai Etzioni, and a number of other writers.18 As articulated by Sandel vis-a`-vis Rawls, the communitarian claim is that Rawls’s theory of justice presupposes an intersubjective conception of the person that Rawls himself officially rejects and repudiates. Sandel insists that if Rawls is to be true to his classic liberal heritage and avoid using some persons as means to others’ ends, he must acknowledge that there is indeed a common subject of possession, that those who share in the use of ‘‘my’’ assets are not strictly to be seen as others, but rather as individuals who, through my relationships and attachments with them, participate in the genuine constitution of my identity as a human being.19 So where Rawls explicitly enunciates the separation of a person and his attributes, this view, which Sandel says Rawls must hold to avoid inconsistency and incoherence, qualifies the distinction between persons by allowing for the possibility that a description of the true self may encompass more than one single empirically individuated human being.20 In other words, the boundaries of a person do not necessarily correspond to the bodily individuation of human beings. Relationships and their quality are partially constitutive of human identity and consciousness. This is not to say that the hermit or shut-in is less of a human being than the gadfly, but simply that their human experience and psychic development as a self is not as existentially textured and personally enriched as it could be.21 By the same token, however, neither should human identity be understood as radically communal. Rawls, at some points, appears to be congenial toward this communitarian intersubjective conception of the self.22 In the end, however, he cannot accept it, since it would mean amending his anthropology to acknowledge that the human self is not as thin as he has argued—and contemporary liberalism understood. Rawls is unwilling to do this because his philosophical anthropology, as he has enunciated it, must remain unchanged if the original position is to function effectively as the device of representation and the generator of the social contract. Rawls’s anthropology disallows for the possibility that the human self could be touched at its core by relationships between people, because, in Rawls’s account, such attachments can be possessed only by the self, who is always at a certain distance from them. They can never be constitutive of who that self actually is. But the intersubjective conception seems to better approximate our actual experience of understanding ourselves, in part at least, by the persons and institutions with whom we have intimate social intercourse. This means that we regard others as moral subjects, like us, who are capable, indeed consigned, to this dialectical process of partly establishing and discovering our identities

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through our continual interactions with others. Brian Crowley summarizes this general idea: To realise our full potential as people, we must be capable of, open to, and engage in such intersubjective attachments while they, in turn, help to define who we are. Such relationships are partly constitutive of who we are, and to that extent our reflection on, and reasoning about, that part of our deeper self will entail the coming to self-awareness of an intersubjective being, whose boundaries transcend those of the individuals it comprises.23

So then the intersubjective conception goes beyond the thin self of Rawls and hypermodern liberalism to a self thickened by its unavoidable relationship to others, a self in part, but by no means totally, defined by the intersubjective dimension. This constitutive dimension, though significant, is partial, because otherwise we would be guilty of misapprehending the self as radically situated and completely embedded in its social context, and as a result basically indistinguishable from it. Thereby it would be diminished as a fully free and self-responsible moral agent. Such a situation, as we previously said, is the polar opposite of Rawls’s radically disembodied self, which is so thin and dispossessed that it is an idea stripped of any meaning. Thus, as a representational image—as part of the original position— it is not an effective intellectual vessel. It is this middle way of intersubjectivity, in which, in Crowley’s words, the self chooses the kind of life it will lead and the values it will have, but against a background of ties and commitments (themselves not necessarily chosen) which give meaning and moral substance to those choices.24

So, by explicitly acknowledging the element of intersubjectivity, we can begin to move toward an understanding of the human self that is cognitively meaningful and plausibly accounts for the construction of human identity. In addition to intersubjectivity, the second part of the alternative philosophical anthropology we are examining features a person who is partially constituted by the reality of his self-awareness. That is, the individual is self-cognizant and able to understand himself as that genus of being which is human, with all the potentialities and intentions that awareness allows. In other words, the human being as a moral subject— under normal circumstances and at some meaningful level—is aware of itself as such, and this very awareness and its construal by the self is an important part of who the person is.25 Self-awareness is a thickening trait that is partly constitutive of one’s identity. Admittedly, self-knowledge is a rather subjective and self-defined

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idea, but it is not without any check whatsoever. The key to establishing the trustworthiness of self-knowledge is realizing that it takes place primarily in a social context. That is, the self-reflective experience of other people, though not defining my own self-awareness, can nonetheless serve as a background of accumulated experience and discovery against which I can compare my own discoveries. In this way, the self-awareness of others serves as a kind of general guide to my own self-discovery, one that can help inform and interpret my own experience. Crowley summarizes the necessity of a social context for self-knowledge: Self-knowledge, then, can only be achieved in a social context in which each struggles to render intelligible to others what one has discovered. A being incapable of offering an account of his actions or of articulating his sense of self, cuts himself off from the best available check on error: the experience of other beings like himself.26

This concept is hardly novel. Classical Greek philosophy had a notion of the self and of human nature. It held these ideas to be objectively meaningful and capable of being known. To the Greeks the most noble human endeavor was the quest to know human essence and to strive to live in conformity with it.27 So it would seem that it is not straining credulity for us to suggest that authentic self-knowledge, as a constituent of our selfhood, is attainable and best forged in a social context. The third element of our sketch of personal identity is the contention that every human self is partially composed of an intrinsic human dignity and worth. Note: this is not the Rawlsean distinction between person and attribute, holding that each person has attributes of which they, from a distance, possess. Rather, I am locating this dignity in the core of the persons themselves, making it a constitutive part of their human identity. It is inseparable from being human. As we indicated in Chapter 1, intrinsic human dignity is effectively grounded in the religious themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But I would like to take a brief detour into the possibility of providing a deliberately public and purposely nonsectarian base for human dignity. Toward that end I will now advance four reasons, which in my view appeal only to common human experience. First, the ‘‘mannishness of man,’’ the distinct ontological otherness about him, indicates to us the specialness of the human being. He is uniquely creative, connected to history in the function of his memory and to the future through his aspirations. He has hopes and fears, including, importantly, an often overwhelming consciousness and fear of death and judgment. Human awareness and concern for the aesthetic similarly reveals this distinctiveness of being. There is within the human heart, all things being equal, a sense—albeit easily corruptible—of the gravitas of human life.28

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Second, the conscience of man, which can be a very powerful force, stands as a signal that differentiates him from all other living beings.29 All persons, at some level, have an innate sense of the moral quality of their actions. This idea has much in common with the Kantian theme of Achtung, or respect for the force of law which all people feel impinging on their mind. The human individual merits the status of intrinsic worth in part because he is a being so constituted as to be concerned, sometimes profoundly, about the moral value of his actions.30 Third, human dignity can be partially grounded in the psychological generalization that under normal circumstances (e.g., not in the heat of combat or in the throes of deep depression or mental illness), no one thinks of himself as expendable or replaceable. That is, we understand ourselves to be existentially unique and, perhaps in a vague and unarticulated way, important. We resist the idea that we, as human individuals, can be blatantly used as mere means to utilitarian ends. Of course, this is a broad psychological generalization that makes no pretense of being sociologically demonstrable. I am only urging readers to consider whether or not their self-understanding includes the idea that they are, as human beings, totally replaceable—or replicable—commodities or entities with no uniquely differentiating personality features. I maintain that people do not normally see themselves in this instrumental way, and that as an absolutely unique and irreplaceable human person, every individual merits being accorded profound intrinsic worth. Fourth, the very existence of millennia of human philosophical reflection indicates a unique human concern for truth and value, a concern that should issue in deep respect for human life. Although this idea has clear similarities with our earlier point about man’s moral sense, it is not the same. For I am here pointing to the mass of human cogitation, the history of knowledge and reflection, and holding it to be indicative of an intrinsic human quality, viz., dignity, which must be highly esteemed. The reality of man’s reflectivity bespeaks a universal capacity for nobleness and inherent worth that can contribute to a meaningful public grounding and recognition of intrinsic human dignity. This dignity, in conjunction with man’s intersubjectivity and selfawareness presents a textured view of the self and society—and their interrelationship—which most accurately reflects their reciprocally dependent dynamic and the primary constitution of the individual person. Rawls and the Right Versus the Good It is a central feature of contemporary liberalism and its most sophisticated theoretical expressions that the ‘‘right’’ decisively precedes the ‘‘good’’ as a moral principle and as a basic organizing concept of ethics and political institutions. It is well beyond the scope of this study to

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delve into this idea in significant detail, but it is of sufficient moment that we should consider it briefly, not only because of the intrinsic importance of the issue itself, but also because the priority of the right over the good is, in a subtle way, fundamental to conceptions of desert we will discuss later. Immanuel Kant, the philosophical inspiration for much of Rawls’s work, believed that people were essentially autonomous and selfdirecting. They were to be understood as authors of values and ends in themselves, the ultimate authority of which is derived from the fact that they are willed freely, freely chosen, and universalizable. This means that human beings are self-determining, that persons must not be seen as mere means to ends, and that there is no basis for preferring—especially in the public square—one person’s ultimate values and vision of the good life to another’s. Kant agreed with the empiricist theme that knowledge begins with experience, but he also agreed with the rationalist claim that the human mind has a central and formative role in our knowledge of reality. Thus, sensual experience constitutes the primary ‘‘input’’ for our knowledge, but all such data are inevitably conceptualized within the human mind. This elaborate conceptualization process (which occurs ‘‘naturally’’ or automatically so that the person does not have to ‘‘will’’ it to happen) involves what Kant called the Forms of Intuition (e.g., time and space) and the Pure Concepts of Understanding (e.g., quantity and quality). Never are phenomena experienced directly; rather, they are filtered through this ‘‘lens,’’ this natural perceptual apparatus of the human mind. The mind does not simply and directly reflect or mirror the order of nature, it actively constitutes that order. Thus, a human being is always at a certain epistemic distance from the object of putative knowledge, say, for example, God or goodness; he is always one step removed from the object of perception as it is in itself. Only phenomenal knowledge is available to each individual, knowledge of the thing as it appears to the person, after having been affected by the human interpretive process.31 Rawls, working from within this tradition, sought rationally to establish principles of just social and political organization which would be untainted, on the one hand, from subjective individual experience, and on the other hand, from external contingencies, for example, the ‘‘Good.’’ Detaching his work from Kant’s metaphysical underpinnings, Rawls— as we have described—sought to ground principles of justice in the discovery procedure he called the ‘‘original position,’’ where ‘‘thin’’ persons stripped of personal attributes and other contingent aspects are placed behind the ‘‘veil of ignorance.’’ Importantly, for Rawls, the most attractive virtue of this arrangement is that each individual’s pursuit of happiness, as he understands it, is unconstrained by ‘‘parochial’’ conceptions of the good (as conceived by others), which the individual may not have

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chosen. Rawls’s whole model is an example of privileging the right over the good, founded on a purely procedural as opposed to substantive conception of justice, intended to be uncommitted to any unacceptable axiological particularities. Michael Sandel crystallizes the Rawlsean— and I would suggest contemporary liberal—rationale for strongly prioritizing the right before the good: According to Rawls, a just society does not try to cultivate virtue or impose on its citizens any particular ends. Rather, it provides a framework of rights, neutral among ends, within which persons can pursue their own conceptions of the good, consistent with a similar liberty for others. This is the claim that the right is prior to the good, and it is this claim that defines the liberalism of the procedural republic.32

But does Rawls’s theory, and the modern liberal posture it has so critically influenced provide enough substantive information about human beings to ethically inform our treatment of our fellows? It seems that it does not, inasmuch as it leaves certain vital questions largely unanswered: ‘‘In what general dispositions and endeavors does human happiness consist?’’ ‘‘What is the purpose of a community?’’ ‘‘What does it mean to respect another person?’’ ‘‘What does it mean to exercise autonomy?’’ Each of these questions drives at a particular yet transpersonal human telos, but the liberal mind is officially committed to not recognizing any such human unity, and with the contemporary liberal denial of a static human nature, it is ill-equipped anyway to support such an idea. Thus, it would seem that Rawls’s approach is not morally informative in a practical sense. Indeed, this is a problem inherent in the prioritizing of the right over the good, and it is only exacerbated by the essentially formal nature of the ‘‘thin’’ person of ethical liberalism who ‘‘seeks happiness,’’ ‘‘desires community,’’ and ‘‘deserves respect.’’ Indeed, as Michael Sandel further explains, the arrangement of the right over the good is directly related to the radically shorn image of the self which characterizes Rawlsean liberalism. Sandel writes, The priority of the self over its ends means I am never defined by my aims and attachments but am always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them. This is what it means to be a free and independent self, capable of choice. And this is the vision of the self that finds expression in the ideal of the state as a neutral framework. On the rights-based ethic, it is precisely because we are essentially separate, independent selves that we need a neutral framework, a framework of rights that refuses to choose among competing purposes and ends. If the self is prior to its ends, then the right must be prior to the good.33

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This conception of the person misses the reality that the question ‘‘What is good for persons?’’ is not separable from a substantive answer to the specific question ‘‘Who or what am I?’’ And this latter question is—contra Rawls—not answerable apart from a deliberate consideration of the real and actual place and roles in society that I occupy, situations that are necessarily, if partially, constitutive of my person.34 But if this is so, then my good must in an important sense be related to the good of those around me, the people who are part of the various communities and associations that partly contribute to who I am. As Alisdair MacIntyre put it, ‘‘What is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these [same] roles.’’35 Thus, in the program of contemporary liberalism, my isolated considerations of my good, based on my personal wants, feelings, and inclinations whatever they may be at this time, run the risk of violating the autonomy and intrinsic worthiness of others. For in deliberating and establishing my own good I draw on and interact with the wills and lives of other free moral agents, who, if my private and radically individuated quest for the good is to be successful, may—in fact, despite theoretical safeguards to the contrary—be required to subjugate their preferences to mine. The question ‘‘What is good for me?’’ cannot be strictly independent of the question ‘‘What is good for others?’’ To this, someone in the tradition of Rawls may reply: Whatever the true essence of the self may be, and whatever the human summum bonum may be, pluralistic societies bear divergent understandings of it, as well as of morality itself. Thus, we must strive for an overlapping consensus among the myriad reasonable but disparate worldviews. We must eschew privileging one notion of the good above others, except to say that persons should be treated fairly and their rights should be respected, and that individuals should be free to mutually pursue their own ends— within a broad circle of personal responsibility, respect for others’ liberties, and the rule of law.36 Does this manner of defense truly work? I think not, but even if for the sake of discussion we assume it does, it succeeds only at the expense of effectively constituting a remarkably thickened theory of the good. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, an inevitable incoherence attaches to the minimalist insistence on the thin theory of the good which the right over the good requires, for it is the good, in its expression, that ‘‘gives the [very] point of the rules which define the right.’’37 Without the normative distinctions that inform a substantial view of the good, we are unable to realize the ethical significance of the actions and sentiments that our moral intuitions, which Rawls fully acknowledges, enjoin upon us.38 Thus, the practical exercise of the right over the good requires a moral particularity that liberals do not wish to acknowledge. Mulhall and Swift summarize this aspect of Taylor’s critique:

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Taylor argues that if the grounds for accepting the priority of the right are fully articulated, they will be found to constitute a very substantive sense of the good, one in which a set of qualitative distinctions hangs together with a particular ontological account of human nature. . . . The absolute priority assigned to the right over the good reflects Rawls’ assignment of absolute priority to the value of autonomy; it reflects the fact that autonomy is the Rawlsian hypergood. Reliance upon a hypergood is not in itself a flaw in any moral theory; it is rather de rigueur.39

The basic reality, then, is that the priority of the right over the good is undeniably a normative distinction, a strong and closely held statement about the ordering of values. Furthermore, it does not hang by itself in midair, but rather is undergirded and derived from a framework of prior values, assumptions, and sentiments that also bear a normative character and are themselves born of still deeper particularity. So in terms of our discussion, it seems that perhaps the conceptual framework of the right over the good can only be defended by deploying some kind of substantial understanding of the good. This has the effect of particularizing any ethics that leans heavily on such a model, and introduces an especially meaningful normativity into the concept of ‘‘right,’’ transforming it from a procedural formality into one more distinctive, parochial vision. Liberalism’s positing of the right as conceptually prior to the good is caught on the horns of a simple dilemma: If it wishes to remain above the philosophical fray between rival conceptions of the good, it risks being so formal as to be ethically vacuous. On the other hand, if it enters into a detailed defense of its basic neutrality as a conceptual order, it becomes effectively yet another distinctive vision of the good, wedded to antecedent philosophical and quite possibly religious assumptions— detailed ideas that cannot be authentically unbiased as to competing understandings of the good. Justice as Redistribution? If, then, there is an inevitability of particularity in political theory and social organization, what is the most appropriate conception of the person? Can the unencumbered, shorn, rational chooser of rights-based liberalism still be sustained, or is the more situated, complex, social self of communitarianism which we have discussed preferable? This inquiry into the substance of a person (his essence, attributes, inclinations, abilities), the content of the immaterial human self, is central to considerations of desert, since we must first have a substantive understanding of the person before we can significantly ponder what he deserves, as a person.

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But even prior to meaningful talk about desert and the outlines of human self-constitution, it is important for us to realize that consideration of these topics is perhaps most significantly—though not exclusively, of course—carried out within the context of discussions of distributive justice. The primary questions of the substance of human identity and the entitlements this identity implicates are those that unavoidably arise when the basic, critical principles of socially just distribution and redistribution try to be articulated. Indeed, the absence of a consensus on just policies of redistribution serves to underline the primacy of the underlying dispute over what a person is, and hence what he deserves. Our general endeavor in this section then will be to analyze the nature of desert in distributive justice and the conception of the self it requires. Such a task would be prohibitively broad if this very discussion was not well represented in the seminal works of Rawls and Robert Nozick, which we will now descriptively compare on this general point. From a practical political standpoint, Rawls and Nozick take diametrically opposite positions. Nozick’s libertarianism stands in stark contrast to the egalitarianism of Rawls, who has been typified as a welfare state liberal.40 Yet, despite their divergent conclusions, it is worth noting that both have much in common philosophically.41 First, both define their theories in explicit opposition to utilitarianism, which they, consistent with their shared liberal framework, see as obliterating the vital distinction between persons. Second, and further evidencing their shared philosophical roots, both Rawls and Nozick describe their positions as rights based, and therefore in their view ensuring the liberty of individuals. Although Nozick’s position is highly Lockean, both he and Rawls appeal to the Kantian principle of treating people as ends, not means, and they portray their theories as embodying this ideal.42 Furthermore, they see no social entity beyond the individual, and they emphatically agree on the plurality and distinctness of persons, heaping calumny on the utilitarian tradition for diminishing this point. Yet, despite this rather substantial philosophical agreement, these two thinkers represent views on the redistribution of wealth that are at polar opposites. In an effort to uncover key elements of their respective understandings of the human person, we will now locate their point of departure on this matter from one another. In discussing the distribution of economic benefits, Rawls considers three principles that could serve as regulative and normative. The first of these is what he refers to as a system of natural liberty. This view defines as just and acceptable any distribution that results from the workings of an efficient market economy in which legal equality of opportunity dominates. The second position Rawls calls ‘‘liberal equality,’’ which he sees as essentially the same as a standard meritocracy. Third, Rawls suggests his own theory of distribution, ‘‘democratic equality,’’

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which is based on his celebrated difference principle (inequalities should be permitted only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged members of society). It is in the course of discussing the merits of these three ideals of economic justice that Rawls fully reveals his view of the human self as a moral subject. Rawls disagrees with a system based on natural liberty on the grounds that it tends merely to replicate or reproduce the initial distribution of individual talents and assets. That is, those possessing the economically lucrative talents and abilities, or the requisite features to obtain those talents and abilities, will inevitably end up better endowed economically than those who did not possess those abilities or the means to obtain those abilities. Rawls further argues that the results of the initial distribution are just only insofar as the initial distribution of assets itself is just. And he maintains that this initial distribution is patently unjust and simply arbitrary, the product of fortuity.43 Since there is nothing to demonstrate the justice of initial endowments, to install them in the name of justice is to embrace pure luck and mistakenly call it not only fair, but also just and tolerable. Rawls sees the principle of liberal equality as slightly less unfair, since it purposes to go beyond mere formal equality of opportunity and compensate for personal, social, and cultural disadvantages by equal educational opportunities, redistributive practices, and other social policies. This would all be intended to provide people with ‘‘the same prospect of success regardless of their initial place in the social system, that is, irrespective of the income class into which they are born.’’44 But Rawls still considers this to be too acquiescent to the arbitrary winds of fortuity. He holds the influence of social and cultural contingencies to be simply too great to allow for any just economic results. Those born into favorable sociocultural frameworks are thereby given an advantage that has no basis in justice. In such circumstances a true meritocracy is simply impossible. To Rawls, both natural liberty and liberal equality are equally arbitrary, and for the same essential reasons, from a moral standpoint.45 In Rawls’s mind, the same reasoning that leads us to prefer liberal equality over natural liberty will also lead us to prefer his ‘‘democratic equality,’’ based on the centrally important difference principle, to liberal equality. Rawls’s difference principle, however, has been convincingly criticized as being no more than a clumsy leveling agent. That is, it does not just strive for equality of opportunity, but rather for rigid equality of result. Critics have suggested that anyone who rejects a meritocracy on the grounds that its consequences are morally arbitrary (as Rawls does) must be committed to a meddlesome, hyperinterventionist philosophy that would unrealistically necessitate constant readjustment of distributive shares to rectify persisting discrepancies of native talent, abilities, effort,

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and personal success. Among the most prominent of these critics has been Daniel Bell. He writes: Rawls concludes that one cannot equalize opportunity, one can only bend it towards another purpose—the equality of result. . . . We have here a fundamental rationale for a major shift in values: Instead of the principle ‘‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his ability,’’ we have the principle ‘‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’’ And the justification for need is fairness to those who are disadvantaged for reasons beyond their control. With Rawls, we have the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialist ethic.46

Charles Frankel has voiced a similar concern, arguing that people do play a vital and unavoidable role in the formation of their character despite the influences of environment, which Rawls so heavily stresses. He also suggests that Rawls’s understanding of justice as fairness critically diminishes human responsibility: . . . [T]he man of twenty in possession of a superior character that enables him to cultivate his abilities, can usually be shown to have done something to produce this character . . . a theory of justice which treats the individual as not an active participant in the determination of his fate, and which is guided by the model of life as a lottery, is unlikely to strengthen peoples’ sense of personal responsibility.47

For Rawls the basic purpose of the difference principle, which is the foundation of his distributive philosophy, is to arrange the state of benefits and burdens so that the least advantaged may participate in the very resources generated by the ‘‘fortunate’’ and ‘‘privileged.’’48 Michael Sandel concisely describes the basis and effect of Rawls’s difference principle: The difference principle is not simply a fuller version of the principle of fair opportunity; it attacks the problem of arbitrariness in a fundamentally different way. Rather than transform the conditions under which I exercise my talents, the difference principle transforms the moral basis on which I claim the benefits that flow from them. No longer am I to be regarded as the sole proprietor of my assets, or privileged recipient of the advantages they bring. . . . In this way the difference principle acknowledges the arbitrariness of fortune by asserting that I am not really the owner but merely the guardian or repository of the talents and capacities that happen to reside in me, and as such have no special moral claim on the fruits of their exercise.49

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Clearly, then, Rawls regards a person’s talents and assets (possessions) as common, not individual. That is, the abilities and character traits I have do not strictly belong to me, but rather they are the common assets of everyone. That being the case, justice requires that all benefit from these common assets—even though I am the one exercising them. The difference principle monitors the corporate benefits of my labor. Although the difference principle as an idea is clearly inclined to egalitarianism, Rawls holds it is ultimately the fact of our common assets that ensures our common fate. Thus, the difference principle functions as a sort of socialistic governor within Rawls’s overall philosophical framework, so that inequalities in either wealth or talents always work to improve the status of the least advantaged, before they work to increase the status of the fortunate. It is abundantly clear at this point that Rawls’s main ideas are working to seriously diminish any role for desert. He readily acknowledges that the difference principle and his notion of common assets clash with traditional understandings of desert: ‘‘There is a natural inclination to object that those better situated deserve their greater advantages whether or not they are to the benefit of others.’’50 But Rawls maintains that the usual conceptions of desert are without question incorrect. He thinks that the argument from arbitrariness bears this out: It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgment that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. . . . The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.51

Rawls essentially maintains that all the wealth an individual has is in significant part the product of fortuity, and not deserved. To Rawls, even the willingness to strive for economic success is the result of arbitrary sociocultural and familial forces, and so the fortunately situated individual is not entitled in any credible moral sense to exclusively benefit from his success. Although I am entitled to benefits that legally come my way within a given social polity, there is no reason to believe that I am entitled to have this polity, which rewards the virtues I possess, to be in force rather than some alternative arrangement. So, Rawls says, the welloff person cannot say that he deserves and therefore has a right to a scheme of cooperation in which he is permitted to acquire benefits in ways that do not

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So not only is the initial distribution of personal assets and talents arbitrary, but so is the social organization one finds oneself in. Since this is the case, to Rawls the most forceful argument anyone can make for a concept of desert is that one is entitled to the benefits answering the legitimate expectations created by public institutions. This falls far short of traditional ideas of desert based on personal effort, personal character, or other personal actions.53 So it is Rawls’s anthropological notion of common assets that largely underlies his theory of distributive justice, empowers his difference principle, and significantly shapes his philosophical anthropology.54 Given that the doctrine of common assets is so heavily freighted, it is worth noting that it—as well as the difference principle and many key aspects of his social understanding—are derived from the hypothetical, preexperiential postulate of the ‘‘original position,’’ an instrument hardly recognized as an unproblematic starting point.55 At any rate, the pivotal anthropological issue of possession, which we have been discussing in terms of Rawls’s view of assets as common, is a topic that is plainly controversial and lends itself to variant characterizations, as Robert Nozick’s similarly influential ideas on this point illustrate. Nozick’s defense of natural liberty and his reply to Rawls’s assertion of the commonality of assets stresses the inviolability of the individual and the clear separateness of persons, classically liberal themes: People will differ in how they view regarding natural talents as a common asset. Some will complain, echoing Rawls against utilitarianism, that this ‘‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’’; and they will wonder whether any reconstruction of Kant that treats peoples’ abilities and talents as resources for others can be adequate. ‘‘The two principles of justice . . . rule out even the tendency to regard men as means to one another’s welfare.’’ Only if one presses very hard on the distinction between men and their talents, assets, abilities and special traits.56

Here Nozick is highlighting the fact that Rawls makes a sharp separation between the human self and its various possessions (talents, abilities, etc.). This distinction is key, because it allows Rawls to advocate, in liberal fashion, the priority of the self over its ends and the concomitant primacy of right over good, as well as enabling him to offer an elaborate defense of his difference principle. In the passage just quoted above, Nozick is intimating that Rawls’s notion of common assets is untrue to its liberal Kantian heritage because

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it opens the door for some people to be used as a means by other people. That is, the talents resident in one person could be utilized to serve the purposes of someone else. But to Rawls this objection fails to realize that my attributes (talents, intelligence, even effort) are only accidentally mine, the product of mere contingency, and are incidental and nonessential to my identity as a person. They are more properly regarded as society’s. For Rawls all personal endowments are accidental and separable from the self, whose antecedent value and priority are therefore secured by its ability always to remain differentiated and separated from social circumstances and conditions. This is the aspect of the liberal self that preserves its identity, by securing its invulnerability to transformation by experience.57 In this way Rawls believes he avoids the inconsistency of using some people as means to others’ ends. Since the self is not identical to its possessions, it is the possessions and not the self that is being used. But inasmuch as he does this, he invites an important related objection that Nozick addresses: Whether any coherent conception of a person remains when the distinction [between self and attributes] is so pressed is an open question. Why we thick with particular traits, should be cheered that (only) the thus purified men within us are not regarded as means is also unclear.58

Nozick perceives correctly, I think, that to maintain that it is only my assets, and not me, which is being used as a means to someone else’s ends is to breach the bounds of coherence. This is a significant shortcoming in Rawls’s exposition. What exactly am I if I am not at least in part the characteristics and traits I evidence? Rawls does not provide us with a substantive answer to this question. Indeed, no view can, which so comprehensively severs the self from any of its attributes. He leaves us with a subject so empty of empirically identifiable features as to resemble nothing more than a formal category, a philosophical abstraction. This, ironically, has the effect of bringing into question the actual individuality and separateness of people, since the differences between them would be concealed. These differences would be entirely immaterial and imperceptible—in other words, of no practical significance. Further still, inasmuch as Rawls commits himself to following this course, he is advancing the same kind of transcendent and disembodied theory of the self as Kant.59 Yet the Kantian idealistic metaphysics of the self, which Rawls has called a ‘‘radically disembodied subject,’’ is something Rawls himself set out to avoid. He has explicitly criticized it as obscure and arbitrary, and unable to produce practical principles of justice.60 Regarding desert specifically, Nozick also criticizes Rawls’s position by holding that the foundations of desert need not themselves be de-

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served ‘‘all the way down.’’ That is, although I may not deserve, in any direct and strong sense, the talents I have, I am still entitled to the benefits that flow from them because my possession of them is not illegitimate. Nozick disputes Rawls’s notion that no one can be said to deserve the benefits of their natural talents and abilities. He writes: It is not true that a person earns Y only if he’s earned whatever he used in the process of earning Y. Some of the things he uses he just may have, not illegitimately. It needn’t be that the foundations underlying desert are themselves deserved, all the way down.61

But this point about desert—while important and valid—presupposes a theory of the person Rawls has actually already rejected. For Rawls the traits one possesses are only related to the self, standing always at a certain distance. They are attributes rather than constituents of the person. They belong to the person, and they are not essential to his identity. In this way Rawls undermines the usual understanding of desert by claiming not that I cannot deserve what is arbitrarily given (the point Nozick refutes), but rather that I cannot possess what is arbitrarily given. To Rawls an arbitrarily given asset cannot be an essential attribute of the person; rather, it must remain at some distance from him.62 So it is apparent that Rawls’s denial of desert does not depend on the exact desert argument Nozick effectively—and valuably—refutes, but rather on a notion of an unencumbered self, a subject of possession that does not possess anything at all in the strong constitutive sense necessary for desert. Interestingly, Nozick’s libertarian theory of justice as a whole has also been criticized, in a different way. The charge is that his theory—and libertarian theories in general—rest on the questionable supposition that all legitimate entitlements can be traced to legitimate acts of original acquisition.63 Nozick’s libertarian zeal and Lockean character have led him, some say, to propound a one-sided view of justice as entitlement, a position radically distinct from Rawls’s view of justice as fair redistribution. MacIntyre summarizes this criticism of Nozick: [C]entral to Nozick’s account is the thesis that all legitimate entitlements can be traced to legitimate acts of original acquisition. But, if that is so, there are in fact very few, and in some large areas of the world no, legitimate entitlements. The property owners of the modern world are not the legitimate heirs of Lockean individuals who performed quasi-Lockean . . . acts of original acquisition; they are the inheritors of those who, for example, stole, and used violence to steal the common lands of England from the common people, vast tracts of North America from the American Indian. . . . This is the historical reality concealed behind any Lockean thesis.

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The lack of any principle of rectification is thus not a small side issue for a thesis such as Nozick’s; it tends to vitiate the theory as a whole.64

But as we are beginning to see, the rectifying force of Rawls’s theory— which is held out as its moral vindication—is itself in danger of being vitiated by the employ of an incoherent metaphysics of the self. In fact, this incoherence is the primary problem with Rawls’s philosophical anthropology. This is the point hinted at earlier, when we showed Rawls’s empirically unencumbered self to be ultimately very much like the overly abstract Kantian model he eschews. This radically disembodied subject, purged as it is of any assets or possessions, is essentially nothing more than a place holder. Rawls has discussed away the person, killed it by qualification. He has pushed the distinction between person and attributes so far as to eliminate any meaningful or intelligible role for the person. In Daniel Bell’s words ‘‘The person has disappeared. Only attributes remain.’’65 Rawls thinks he protects the self by detaching its fate from the fate of its attributes and goals, contingent as they are on circumstance. True to his liberal heritage, he has tried to preserve the autonomy of the self. But, by so emphatically separating it from anything concrete, he effectively dissolves it into a cognitively empty abstraction. Rawls makes the human person inviolable at the cost of also making it invisible and irrelevant. Brian Crowley nicely summarizes the inherent contradictions of such an anthropology which seeks to understand the self as totally unencumbered by constitutive attachments and as a radically free subject of choice: In the case of Rawls . . . values are seen as self-validating to the extent that men hold them as the result of a process of choice in which they strip themselves down, remove or ignore all desires and empirical circumstances, everything that is contingent and therefore morally arbitrary, and then choose their values through a process of pure reasoned reflection. . . . [but] while claiming that the liberal self is pure reason and ability to choose, liberalism denies to the self a morally significant context within which either reasoning or choosing can take place. . . . this view simultaneously affirms the absolute responsibility of each person for his values and desires, because he or she has chosen them, but sees that choice as capricious and arbitrary. The person I am is not engaged in the first crucial choice of values, because that person, conceived as an agglomeration of wants, desires, attachments and goals, can only exist after the choice. . . . The abstract nature of the conception, far from being its greatest strength, is its fatal flaw. A self without attributes and constitutive attachments cannot possibly choose, in any significant sense of that term, what its attributes ought to be, any more than a mind bereft of knowledge can reason about what the world or the person ought to be like.66

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It seems clear that Rawls’s argument has the paradoxical effect of disparaging the classically liberal ideals of human dignity and autonomy it purports to enhance. Nozick, perceiving this, remarks tellingly: So denigrating a person’s autonomy and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line to take for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the dignity and self-respect of autonomous beings; especially for a theory that founds so much (including a theory of the good) upon a person’s choices. One doubts that the unexalted picture of human beings Rawls’s theory presupposes and rests upon can be made to fit together with the view of human dignity it is designed to lead to and embody.67

Although Rawls wants to propagate and strengthen a high view of human dignity and the intrinsic worth of the individual person, it is the greatest weakness and shortcoming of his theory that it holds people to have no intrinsic worth at all, apart from whatever worth just institutions attribute to them. I would like to draw attention to this point. To Rawls people have no intrinsic value, prior to and independent of social structures, because he has rejected the antecedently necessary substantive theory of the person that would warrant and support this valuing. 68 Of course, he does not baldly assert this point. It appears within the framework of his overall theory—as we have just presented—and is part of his larger, general argument that the principles of justice should not reward virtue and moral desert but rather should encourage and enhance the resources and talents necessary to improve everyone’s interests, beginning with the least advantaged.69 Rawls is effectively affirming that you and I, as human beings, derive our value from social institutions, and not from our ontological status as human beings. This is a blatantly instrumentalist view of people. They are no longer seen as antecedently valuable and worthy of service by government and social structures, but rather they have their value ascribed to them by social structures and have become the means by which the government, as it sees fit, establishes justice and furthers equality. Inasmuch as Rawls’s macro-theory is moving in this direction, he is betraying his liberal heritage and impugning the absolute and unconditional value and dignity of the human individual. I would assert that no set of claims about the person and the human self which do not allow a central place for the naturally intrinsic, immutable, inviolable dignity of the human individual can be accepted as credible and fully explanatory. While Rawls’s approach does well to remind us of the contingencies of life and the primary importance of tolerably just social arrangements, it does not present us with a satisfying picture of the person, human freedom, or human dignity, and so cannot compel allegiance.

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Justice as Desert It is Rawls’s distinctive view of the person, which, as we have seen, licenses him to understand desert in the disparaging way he does. For Rawls it cannot serve as a basic factor in social justice, because nobody can be said to deserve their standing, in any strong sense, since they themselves have not brought it about.70 But I maintain that this deterministic view is a mistaken evaluation of the potential importance of desert for social justice theorizing and an underrecognition of its moral power as an idea. We intuitively expect desert to play a role in our moral evaluations, and we understand there to be a moral relationship between what a person does and what he gets. We feel slighted or offended if we do not get what we know we have earned (a paycheck, for example). Similarly, we feel outraged or abused if we get something bad which we do not deserve (arrested for a crime we did not commit, for example), and we know that if we receive something good we have not earned (e.g., a larger than usual paycheck) that it is a gift—or a mistake. It is not an overstatement to say we define moral acceptability on the basis of fittingness, or desert, in both its positive and negative senses. If Rawls’s rigid and sweeping doctrine of common assets and the redistributional imperative of the difference principle are rejected (as they must be if we recognize that human beings, being intrinsically dignified, are more substantially constituted and to some extent more firmly embedded in their social context than Rawls is willing to allow), then the way is clear for us to construct a social role for desert that better coheres with our moral intuitions.71 The fundamental reality that a fuller conception of the self allows us to embrace is no less than authentic human freedom itself. If the self is thick with traits and qualities, then that which is essentially caused by the employ of those qualities through freely willed personal effort, persistence, and skill is rightly judged as belonging fundamentally to the individual himself. Rawls, of course, maintains that the claim that one deserves the superior character that empowers him to cultivate his abilities is false, since his character depends in large part on favorable family and social circumstances for which he cannot legitimately take credit.72 The phrase ‘‘in large part,’’ which appears in Rawls’s text, is significant because in its ambiguity and vagueness it draws attention to the speculative and unsupportable nature of the claim that the formation of my character is not something over which I have decisive control and for which I am responsible. This must be wrong. In Rawls’s view, we are all essentially products of fortuity, and the circumstances of our births and the environments of our lives hold sway over any decisions we might make, or wish to make, to be one way or another. This appears

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to be an unforgivably deterministic thesis, and one that edges close to the Marxist theme of economics as the ultimate arbiter of morality. To accept Rawls’s claim is to believe that wealth and privilege cause social competence and practically useful character, and that those born in unfortunate familial and social contexts cannot attain the character traits required to succeed. But birth is not destiny, and, contemporary liberal assumptions to the contrary, one’s economic origins do not dictate one’s economic future. This, of course, is the beauty and power of democratic capitalism, and the great virtue of the American experiment that has been borne out in this century. In this country perhaps more than any other, who one’s parents are does not determine who or what one will be. Contemporary liberal theory does not concur with this basic lesson of the American experience. Character—the complex of thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that are one important aspect of the substance of one’s identity—is not wholly or even primarily bestowed on us by forces exterior to ourselves. We are not passive recipients of our character; rather, we are active agents in its formation, volitionally participating—through our behavior and mental dispositions—in who we are becoming. This is not to say that we are impervious to familial and social influences, or that our larger social context is utterly irrelevant to our personal development and selfformation. Certainly such factors play a part in the construction of our character, but our personal experience indicates that our free will is a far stronger and more pressing factor in forming our character. Someone born into wealth and privilege, with the most nurturing environment possible, could still end up a penniless sloth or convicted felon. Similarly, a poor child raised in the midst of urban decay and dysfunction could nonetheless end up a successful, eminently competent individual.73 The distribution of economic assets, then, is not necessarily immoral simply for being unequal. Income inequality, as a bare and relentless social reality, is not necessarily immoral, despite the absolutist egalitarian dogma that it is.74 Inequalities that flow from disparate effort, education, experience, or market placement—under the prevailing conditions of legal equality—are morally unproblematic. Unequal distribution on grounds of merit or desert is morally permissible; indeed, justice requires it if unequal levels of desert exist. A critical distinction can be made between equal distribution of goods and equitable distribution of goods.75 The former mandates identity of quantity and is appropriate in the contexts of legal protection and basic human rights (such as the right to live, freedom of religious belief, etc.). The latter requires only that the context of desert is fair; that is, given the constraints of human finitude and governmental competence, a maximum of equality of opportunity has been provided. Thus, all other factors being fair, the individual who works at a job fifty-five hours a week

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out of a desire to be promoted has earned the extra economic rewards she receives, as compared to a co-worker who chooses to work only forty hours a week. Similarly, the man who invests the effort to become a software designer and earns more money than the receptionist at the company where he works is fairly entitled to that money. To say he does not deserve it because he did not earn the superior intellect that enabled him to write software is to misapply desert as a concept. The putative negation of desert is not a great eraser, which can remove the circumstances of life or homogenize initial endowments. He did not have to apply his intellect in the ways he did to achieve what he has achieved. The education, labor, and antecedent will to engage in those practices qualify him to benefit exclusively from their fruits—except for a restrained level of taxation to fund civil protection and public works, and ensure a minimal floor of well-being for the handicapped and legitimately indigent.76 Similarly, it is by no means a sound assumption that the receptionist could not have become a software engineer. Given the context of legal equality, it would be patronizing, if not insulting, to believe that she could not have reached this personal accomplishment. The extra personal practical hurdles she may have had to overcome to achieve this standing—for example, innate low math aptitude or no computer experience—are not the moral fault of anyone and should not be reckoned insurmountable. That some people have more difficulties in life than others is a brute fact of the human condition and is beyond the capacity of social policy to redress. Rawls’s and contemporary liberalism’s attempts to do so through, for example, such compensatory tools as the difference principle can never be truly just or comprehensively successful since human institutions never have full and total knowledge of people’s potentials and circumstances. This is the basic thesis of F. A. Hayek in The Mirage of Social Justice: no government or central authority can have sufficient knowledge to establish its preferred distributional pattern on a society.77 Such attempts are doomed to fail. As John Gray succinctly writes, ‘‘[G]overnment could never have sufficient information to know whether [Rawls’s] Difference Principle . . . has been satisfied.’’78 The world is as it is, people are not identical, people will not be equally motivated to excel, and we cannot make the world otherwise. Indeed, the effort to do so in its statist machinations results in withdrawing a degree of freedom from the public. As Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman said, ‘‘A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.’’79 It is indeed ironic that contemporary liberalism, flush with the thrills of ‘‘diversity,’’ would seek to suppress the inevitable socioeconomic manifestations of differences in innate talent, demeanor, and will. Its effort to do so has created a pronounced sentiment of revulsion

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among some social critics and many citizens. They have grown tired of the routinized, de rigueur accent in public life on entitlement, and the widespread sense of victimization such emphasis creates. As the late journalist William A. Henry III insightfully wrote: We have foolishly embraced the unexamined notions that everyone is pretty much alike (and, worse, should be), that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement . . . that a good and just society should be far more concerned with succoring its losers than with honoring and encouraging its winners to achieve more and thereby benefit everyone. . . . We have devoted our rhetoric and resources to the concept of entitlement, the notion that citizens are not to ask what they can do for their country, but rather to demand what it can do for them. The list of what people are said to be ‘‘entitled’’ to has exploded exponentially as we have redefined our economy, in defiance of everyday reality, as a collective possession myth of communal splendor rather than simultaneous individual achievements. . . . We have taken the legal notion that all men are created equal to its illogical extreme, seeking not just equality of justice in the courts but equality of outcomes in almost every field of endeavor. Indeed, we have become so wedded to this expectation that our courts may now accept inequality of outcomes as prima facie proof of willful bias.80

The hubris required to thus violate the common sense of the general public stems ultimately from the anthropology of contemporary liberalism. As we alluded to earlier in our discussions of human nature, the animating belief of much modern liberal sentiment and policy—as constructed by knowledge class elites and academics—is a strongly utopian confidence in the capacities of human social and political construction. Utopian fantasies are characteristic of such people.81 Realism and practicability do not decisively condition the plans of those caught in the grip of utopianism and the self-satisfaction it brings. Hence, schemes of redistribution and the low view of desert they tend to emphasize sail through critical scrutiny, vindicated by their intended ends, however amorphous and dissonant with common sense and human experience. But utopianism is not the full story of the motivation driving contemporary liberalism. There is also the pungent and pronounced hostility to mainstream American bourgeois culture. During the cold war this was seen in the American left’s idealization of Soviet communism and the Marxist critique of Christianity and capitalism.82 The sweeping demise of the Soviet Union and Marxism as a worldview—almost everywhere outside of elite American universities—created an embarrassing vacuum for progressives. This void was filled with the sustained hegemony of the ‘‘politically correct’’ critique of American politics, with its emphasis on liberal ‘‘compassion,’’ the comparatively uncompassionate ‘‘mean-

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spirited’’ philosophy of Newt Gingrich and his ilk, and the worry that the ‘‘religious right’’ would impose its benighted values on everyone.83 Ironically, the coercion of liberty in this country today comes far more from the left than from the right. The recent actions of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are a case in point. Not exactly known for its traditionalism, San Francisco is now setting new trends in the liberal encroachment on free thought. In 1996 the city council declared that contractors wishing to do business with the city must extend full insurance benefits to the domestic partners of all employees. As Jewish ethicist Dennis Prager remarked, if a southern bible belt city required contractors to post the Ten Commandments in their offices if they wished to do business with the city, there would be a massive outcry of offense from the seats of liberal advocacy in this country.84 But the efforts of liberals in San Francisco to impose their morality on employers goes unchallenged by the American left and virtually unnoticed by the American press. Such double standards flourish in the American social landscape because contemporary liberalism is intoxicated with its own moral superiority over its ideological competitors. The ends are seen as justifying the means when the cause is so obviously important and so undeniably correct.85 This supreme confidence is born of the quite definite religious zeal with which many liberals hold their politics. Contemporary liberalism functions as the personal religion of many of its more committed adherents, who tend to be secular, educated, urban, and white.86 This helps explain its success in American culture, despite its many excesses. The boosters of contemporary liberalism are activistic, litigious, and deliberately working for change, and they are doing so with a missionary zeal. In contrast, conservatives and traditionalists, by definition, do not tend to press their personal involvement in the workings of politics and controversy. This historical pattern is slowly changing, however, as the face of American life becomes difficult to recognize to those most familiar with its traditional form. The substantial demise of desert as conceptually essential to justice is emblematic of this transformation. A Philosophy of Human Accomplishment What, then, are we to say about how a general social reintroduction of the basic concept of desert—one based on a sound understanding of the person—would proceed? It would most essentially require an intellectual foundation that is presently absent in American social criticism: a philosophy of human accomplishment. It is the absence of such a rigorously articulated framework which has helped suppress discussions of desert, as well as stall and deadlock much of our consideration of cul-

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turally contentious issues. While it is well beyond our scope to limn such a philosophy here, we can point to what some of its key elements would be. In my view, the essential components of an understanding of individual accomplishment would include at least the following ideas: individual accomplishments should be recognized as ultimately self-generated; the rewards or consequences of individual accomplishment must overwhelmingly accrue to the individual; and not all human accomplishments are of equal value to society. While these points in their full exfoliation would evince an interrelationship, such exposition is too far afield for us here, and, as I indicated above, they do not by themselves constitute a full-fledged theory of human achievement at any rate. However, they are three useful and important conceptual ingredients. To say that individual achievements should be recognized as ultimately self-generated is to offend much of the deterministic analysis by race, class, and gender that is so popular in the rubric of contemporary liberalism. And yet if human freedom is to be genuinely acknowledged, and if we are to authentically understand the means by which people prosecute tasks, it is an understanding we must embrace. Although each of us lives in a particular social, political, cultural, and familial context, and although our psychobiological processes and communities of association act on our intellection, each of us nonetheless possesses the remarkable power of will. We can choose to do simple actions, and we can choose to do complex actions. We are to varying extents and in manifold ways influenced and affected by the factors comprising our personal contexts and contributing to our self-formation; yet still we must acknowledge that in the end our substantial freedom is a reality.87 We are not fully free and autonomous, but if we are able to suppress our natural drive to rationalize and justify our behavioral, relational, or professional shortcomings, and if we are able to frankly be objective to our personal history of choices and selected attitudes, we can admit that our lives could have turned out differently than they have (for better or worse), and we can acknowledge the perhaps painful reality that we have navigated our own existential ship to the shore on which it now sits—and the ports it visited along the way. Hence, whatever aids or hindrances I experienced along the journey were not decisive. They played a role in my journey, and they inevitably did foreclose on some opportunities and open up others, but my substantial freedom still perdured, and I could have formed my life in ways other than I did. The penchant of the liberal narratives of human life ascendant today is to infer, erroneously, that since I have been impacted by circumstances, my personal freedom was therefore neutered. But this is an unrealistic, atomized understanding of freedom. To be at liberty does not mean that one can do absolutely anything and that one is utterly untouched by

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unwilled forces external to their person. To live in society is unavoidably to be under constraint and to be touched by other people and the consequences of their deeds. But this does not warrant the inferential leap to determinism. I am still a free person though I live under the wide range of constraints that necessarily accompany family, the rule of law, the free market, social life, my physical appearance, and a whole collection of other variables. Whatever I have accomplished for good or ill has mainly, though not exclusively, been accomplished because of choices I selected. My life today is the expression of my general freedom up to this point. Although for some more than others the context of their personal history has more tightly impinged on their freedom and more decisively circumscribed their behavioral options, only in the most psychologically traumatized of persons can it reasonably be said that they are not responsible moral agents. With this understanding, we can accept the notion that individuals themselves are primarily to blame or praise for the state of their lives. However dissonant with the spirit of our age and the prevailing habits of social analysis, individual selfresponsibility is a reality. A further component of how we might understand and react socially to human achievement is that we insist that the rewards of individual accomplishment overwhelmingly accrue to the responsible individual. The one who has shouldered the psychic burden of self-responsibility and achieved positively has a moral claim on the benefits derived from his work. This is simply to observe desert. The importance of this principle lies in the psychological fact that violations of desert are psychologically disabling to the individual and, eventually, to society. People who work but then are prevented from reaping the vast preponderance of benefits from that work become demotivated and less productive. Oppressive and high rates of income tax have borne this principle out repeatedly. When people are prevented from access to what they deserve, they become angry, resentful, sullen, and alienated from work. This idea, writ large, can stall the economic engine of a nation.88 This imperative of desert is also true negatively. When people do not suffer punishment for crime and lawlessness they have practiced, besides the intrinsic injustice and righteous social anger that results, that individual perpetrator himself has also been harmed (internally), since a primary means of moral instruction and recovery (the censure of society) has been withheld from him. This is not to say that criminals will not be aware of their immorality unless they are caught and tried; rather, it is to say that the absence of consequences and censure (shame) for wrongdoing functions as a lure into further wrongdoing.89 As welfare analyst Lawrence Mead of New York University said simply: ‘‘The sanction of social disapproval seems essential for deterring antisocial behavior.’’90 The intrinsic dignity of the criminal is further prevented from

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manifesting extrinsically when he is not publicly held to account for his transgressions. We have greatly erred in this country by failing to follow as closely as possible the moral imperative of desert. Like so many of the disordered values of our time, this too is fostered by contemporary liberalism’s unbalanced commitment to egalitarianism. As William A. Henry III wrote, In the pursuit of egalitarianism, an ideal wrenched far beyond what the founding fathers took it to mean, we have willfully blinded ourselves to home truths those solons well understood, not least the simple fact that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.91

And this refusal to see differences in people and what they have deserved is socially disruptive, engendering anger and a general lack of confidence from the public that the deeds of government, the courts, and legislators will correspond with the sentiments of common sense. Closely related to this idea is the recognition that not all human accomplishments are of equal value to society. There is a loose but perceptible general hierarchy of objective social value to what people do with their lives, and we cannot pretend otherwise. Some people simply contribute more to the general welfare of their society than do others. For example, Jonas Salk in his polio vaccine contributed more than most people, whereas the serial killer Richard Ramirez contributed nothing positive to the common good. Most of us fall between these two poles, and our lives in their moral decency, occupational productivity, and interpersonal relationships amount to a definite addition to the future viability, wealth, and humanity of our commonweal. This is not to present a utilitarian calculus of each life and somehow pretend to be able to comprehensively arbitrate between each person. Rather, it is to insist on the acknowledgment of what we already know to be the case, an awareness we evince in our civic rituals of parades and awards, and in our death rituals of praise and eulogy: some lives are publicly heroic in their clear service to others, other lives are anonymously heroic in their steady virtue, still other lives are unremarkable, and some are simply bad. Contemporary liberalism’s need to avoid ranking human behavior—except when it serves its political values (as with the exaltation of the avant-garde artist, AIDS activist, religious renegade, or multiculturalist zealot)—suppresses our public recognition of what we intuitively know to be the unequal nature of individual activities. The man who regularly feeds the homeless and hungry at the downtown mission when he gets off work is objectively better than the man who goes home and watches pornographic videos each evening. The modern

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liberal inclination to term these disparate habits simply ‘‘lifestyle choices’’ obscures the inevitably value-laden nature of human behavior. They are certainly lifestyle choices, but they are not that merely. Having said that, however, it should be pointed out that the personal internal, subjective valuation of one’s accomplishments does not necessarily correspond to the social valuation of one’s life and work. For example, perhaps in Jonas Salk’s own mind his greatest accomplishment was his relationship with his family or friends, and not his work on the polio vaccine. Given the often complicated and sometimes nonrational nature of interpersonal relationships and self-understanding, psychological or emotional accomplishments may hold the ascendancy in one’s own mind over professional or public achievements. But whether or not there is a correspondence between self-valuation of private and public achievements, it is irresistibly true that not all lives issue in socially equal achievements, though they are all, as human, intrinsically dignified. The achievements of human beings, from the obvious to the subtle, form the basis of our social maintenance and cultural life. Further reflection on the proper manner of understanding true human achievement would allow us not only to celebrate, as we too rarely do, authentic social accomplishment (and not merely fame), but also to forge rudimentary elements of a philosophy of accomplishment that would allow us to begin relying more regularly and significantly on the critical concept of desert as a distributional judge and moral referee. As an ethical concept to which we are naturally, deeply, and indissolubly attached, it is uniquely suited for that role. NOTES 1. ‘‘Merit’’ could also be used as a synonym here. 2. This line of thinking is sometimes introduced as supporting theism. It is related to a family of arguments for theism usually called arguments from ‘‘mind’’ or ‘‘consciousness.’’ Useful general treatments of this approach are A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973) and Stephen Clark, From Athens to Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 3. This point, especially with respect to children’s moral sense, is argued cleverly by C. S. Lewis in his Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1943), pp. 17–43. Of course, offense at injustice can be trained out, as it were, of the individual through the suppression of conscience and the cultivation of habits counter to this sense. 4. Indeed, currently, the average convicted murderer spends just 8.5 years in actual lockup before being released. See William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 50. The misplaced compassion of contemporary liberalism has constructed a criminal justice system that is all too often more solicitous of the rights of convicted criminals than it is of their victims. For example, one man in California, who con-

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fessed to terrorizing more than 100 women, and who in 1982 was convicted of multiple rapes, was released from prison in 1997, after serving just fifteen years of his twenty-five-year sentence. See Thomas Sowell, ‘‘Criminal Justice System Is Cruel to the Innocent,’’ Human Events, February 28, 1997, p. 18. Similarly, James Lee Lyles, age 53, was driving drunk in August of 1996, when he plowed into the parked car of 27-year-old Mexican immigrant Carlos Granados Gallardo. Mr. Granados, his wife and four children, ages 8, 4, 3, and 1, were sitting in their car eating a fast-food dinner in celebration of Mr. Granados’ obtaining a new job. They were all killed when Lyles’ car recklessly plowed into theirs. As punishment for driving drunk and killing these six people, Lyles was sentenced to nine years in prison. See ‘‘Mourners Recall Family Killed in Crash,’’ Los Angeles Times (Home Edition), August 31, 1996, p. B1. 5. On the disproportionately high rates of violent crime committed by blacks, see Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, pp. 22–23, 45, 67, 78. See also the articles on black crime by John J. DiIulio, Jr., in note 48 in Chapter 1. 6. Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 67– 69. 7. See Robert Bork’s discussion of this conquest in Chapters 1 and 2 of his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. I will be quoting from the 1973 Oxford University Press paperback edition of that book. It is nearly impossible to comprehensively document the commentary on a book so emphatically discussed over twenty-five years, but the following references include some standard critiques of A Theory of Justice and its themes, and they are themselves replete with bibliographical references that will aid the reader in further research. See Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Theories of Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Brian Crowley, The Self, the Individual, and the Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Stuart Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Michael W. Jackson, Matters of Justice (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Chandran Kukathas and Phillip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Rex Martin, Rawls and Rights (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985); Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1992); T. W. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); David Schaefer, Justice or Tyranny? (London: Kennikat Press, 1979); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). Helpful journal issues wholly devoted to Rawls are Social Theory and Practice 3, no. 1 (Spring 1974) and Midwest Studies in Philosophy 1, no. 1 (February 1976). Powerful criticisms of Rawlsean liberalism are to be found in two books by J. Budziszewski, The Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

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University Press, 1986) and True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgment (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992). 9. A point well made by Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 1. With good reason, John W. Montgomery has referred to Rawls’s ideas as ‘‘the single most influential moral philosophy of this generation.’’ J. W. Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986), p. 93. 10. On the claim that Rawls represents the spirit of contemporary liberalism, see Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 13. 11. Ibid., p. 25. For some valuable criticisms of the device of the original position, see D. J. Bentley, ‘‘John Rawls: A Theory of Justice,’’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 5 (May 1973): 1074; The chapter entitled ‘‘Character, Depth and Rationality’’ in Crowley, The Self, the Individual and the Community; Thomas Scanlon, Jr., ‘‘Rawls’ Theory of Justice,’’ University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 121, no. 5 (May 1973): 1069; Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. p. 44. 12. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 60–65, 122–126. 13. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William. B. Eerdmans, 1984), p. 257. 14. Larry Churchill, Rationing Health Care in America: Perceptions and Principles of Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 45–46. Rawls, in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), classifies such criticisms as a misunderstanding of the nature of the original position as an abstraction. See his discussion on pp. 26–28 of that work. Rawls cites the response of Will Kymlicka to Michael Sandel’s powerful criticisms of the Rawlsean person in Chapter 4 of Kymlicka’s book, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) as generally authoritative. See Political Liberalism, p. 27 n. 29. 15. Certainly, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) is among the most important challenges to A Theory of Justice, but it is best thought of as distinct from the communitarian responses to Rawls alluded to here. Nozick, as a libertarian conservative, shares Rawls’s voluntarist notion of human freedom as well as much of his highly individualist conception of the self. Later in this chapter we will explore some critical differences between Nozick’s and Rawls’s thought. For an excellent survey and critique of Nozick’s thought, including his anthropological arguments, see the compilation of articles in Jeffrey Paul, ed., (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981). Alisdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 246–253 presents a helpful comparison of Rawls’s and Nozick’s theories of justice, as does Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 77–85, 94– 102. John Rawls’s latest major work Political Liberalism is a revision of A Theory of Justice inasmuch as he offers a distinctly political conception of justice appropriate to a deeply pluralistic society riven by reasonable but competing conceptions of the good. But much of his thinking remains the same, and the elements of Rawlsean thought we will reflect on are substantially unchanged from their presentation in A Theory of Justice. See the ‘‘Introduction to the Paperback Edition’’

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of Political Liberalism for Rawls’s contrast of these two books. See also the fine discussion of Mulhall and Swift in Chapters 5 and 6 of Liberals and Communitarians for reflection on ways in which Rawls’s thought has evolved since A Theory of Justice. For insightful reviews of Political Liberalism from a variety of perspectives, see Stuart Hampshire, ‘‘Liberalism: The New Twist,’’ New York Review of Books, August 12, 1993, pp. 43–47; Stephen Holmes, ‘‘The Gatekeeper,’’ The New Republic, October 11, 1993, pp. 39–47; Robert Bork, ‘‘Justice Lite,’’ First Things, November 1993, no. 37, pp. 31–32; and Ernest Van Den Haag, ‘‘Is Liberalism Just?’’ The Public Interest, no. 113, Fall 1993, pp. 122–127. 16. See, generally, Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State; Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), A Matter of Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 17. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); William Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: The Free Press, 1991); MacIntyre, After Virtue; and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, Human Agency and Language, and Vol. 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 18. For critiques and commentary on the general communitarian theme from various perspectives, some of which are themselves imbued with communitarian ideas, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992); Amitai Etzioni, ed., New Communitarian Thinking (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Amy Gutmann, ‘‘Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,’’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 308–322; Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians; Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982). 19. See Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 168–183. 20. Ibid., p. 80. 21. A full-blown discussion of complete human identity as it exists through changes in time and space is well beyond our scope and purpose here, although that general issue is obviously relevant to the overall moral question of the relationship of desert to human nature which we are considering here. For valuable, comprehensive discussions of the identity of persons, see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); John Perry, ed., Personal Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

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22. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 529ff, 560ff, and Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 27–35. 23. Crowley, The Self, the Individual and the Community, p. 218. 24. Ibid., p. 219. 25. This should not be read to imply a functional definition of personhood, for I am addressing the elements of human identity, not of human standing. That is, my point here is psychological and moral, not ontological. So those persons, for example, who are unconscious, comatose, or in a persistent vegetative state would not be considered nonhuman or partially human, or in any ontological way different from people who are conscious and fully functional. 26. Crowley, The Self, the Individual and the Community, p. 217. 27. Ibid. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Chapter 2, for an explanation of this idea. 28. See Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1979), pp. 125–126, for a brief discussion of the uniqueness of man. 29. The case of career-criminal Julian Imperial is an example of the remarkable power of the human conscience. In 1977 Imperial and an accomplice broke into the home of 73-year-old Mary R. Stein and beat her to death. The woman’s dying words, ‘‘Oh Lord, I’m coming home’’ haunted Imperial, and when he became a Christian a year after the murder he was stricken with an intensified sense of guilt, shame, and responsibility. These feelings endured, and grew, over the course of seventeen years. Although the police were not actively considering him a suspect in the case—now seventeen years old—Imperial still felt inwardly compelled to tell the truth. He freely turned himself in to the police station, admitting his involvement in Mary Stein’s murder, in the fall of 1994. See ‘‘A Conscience Cries Out, and Finally Wins the Fight,’’ Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1994, p. A41. 30. For discussion, see C. S. Lewis’s famous appendix, ‘‘Illustrations of the Tao’’ in his The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan Press, 1947) as well as the section entitled ‘‘Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’’ in Lewis’s Mere Christianity for explanations of the universality of the human conscience and moral sense. 31. See Francis Canavan, ‘‘Liberalism in Root and Flower,’’ in Canavan, The Pluralist Game (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 115–123 for discussion of the political and moral consequences of this manner of approach. Helpful expositions of Kant’s full epistemology are found in Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (New York: Humanities Press, 1962); and T. D. Weldon, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). 32. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 290. 33. Michael Sandel, ‘‘The Political Theory of the Procedural Republic,’’ in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr Today (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William. B. Eerdmans, 1989), p. 25. This essay also appears in Allan C. Hutchinson and Patrick J. Monahan, eds., The Rule of Law (Toronto: Carswell, 1987). 34. Crowley, The Self, the Individual and the Community, p. 222ff. On such an

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intersubjective view of the self, see Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 79–82 and elsewhere. See also Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, pp. 21–40 for discussion of the various different senses in which Rawls employs the distinction between the right and the good. Also see Rawls’s article, ‘‘The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,’’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (1988): 251–276 for Rawls’s own updated thoughts on the right and the good, and his contention that in his theory no specific, comprehensive religious, moral, or philosophical system is presupposed. For helpful analysis, see Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, pp. 215–219. Since the criticism presented here of the priority of the right over the good is a holistic one directed at the general concept as an ordering device for social and political polity, it is essentially unaffected by Kymlicka’s and Rawls’s explanations. 35. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 205. 36. While this typical formulation of the philosophical rationale for the right over the good has some persuasive power, that is, it sounds like it might work, the social and political practices it actually issues in are far less neutral than this statement assures. As Sandel points out in Democracy’s Discontent (pp. 20–21; 100– 103), the minimalist self of liberalism and the Rawlsean political conception of justice (as opposed to a philosophical one) cannot sustain true moral neutrality and the bracketing of ethical and religious questions in politics. Inevitably, social and political life engages substantive moral and religious questions, showing that the priority of right over good cannot be practically sustained. There is an inevitability of particularity in social and political organization, and the liberal construction of the right over the good obscures this, pretending to be able to function as a political construct which can serve as an arbitrative framework for social controversies. But as Sandel shows with respect to abortion and other controversial issues, liberal neutrality ends up being quite parochial. Canavan makes this same general point in The Pluralist Game, when he explains: ‘‘A pluralist society must perforce strive to be neutral about many things that concern its divided citizens. But it cannot be neutral about all of them. If it tries or pretends to be neutral about certain issues, the pluralist game becomes a shell game by which people are tricked into consenting to changes in basic social standards and institutions on the pretense that nothing more is asked of them than respect for the rights of individuals. Much more, however, is involved: on the fundamental issues of social life, one side or the other always wins. . . . There is inescapably a public morality—a good one or a bad one—in the sense of some set or other of basic norms in the light of which the public makes policy decisions’’ (pp. 78–79). The general point about the strong moral particularity of contemporary liberalism is well-documented in Robert Bork’s survey in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). See also J.Budziszewski, ‘‘The Illusion of Moral Neutrality,’’ First Things, July/August 1993, pp.32–37. 37. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 89. 38. See Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, pp. 119–120. 39. Ibid., pp. 123–124. For further discussion on the unacknowledged particularity of Rawls’s theory as a whole, see Budziszewski, True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgment, pp. 76–78.

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40. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 66. 41. Ibid., p. 67. 42. See Cheney C. Ryan, ‘‘Yours Mine and Ours: Property Rights and Individual Liberty,’’ Ethics, January 1977, pp. 126–141, for a description of Nozick’s Lockean foundations. For a brief discussion of the formative and influential role classical liberal philosophy has played in both Rawls’s and Nozick’s social thought, see Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy , pp. 99–117. Michael Novak holds that many contemporary liberals (he uses Rawls as an example) have departed from the classic liberal political tradition in favor of a less credible, modern variation. See Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good, pp. 157–158. 43. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 72. 44. Ibid. , p. 73. 45. Ibid. , p. 75. 46. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 441, 444. For a summary and analysis of the social thought of Daniel Bell, see Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 161–188. 47. Charles Frankel, ‘‘The New Egalitarianism and the Old,’’ September 1973, pp. 58–59. 48. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 70. 49. Ibid. 50. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 103. 51. Ibid. , p. 104. See the books by Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973), pp. 112–117, and Doing and Deserving (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970) for clear explanations of concepts of desert. 52. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 104. 53. The force of such traditional understandings of desert (e.g., the principles of effort, due return, contribution, etc.) has been located in their ‘‘intuitive cogency.’’ See Feinberg, Social Philosophy, p. 116. 54. Although Rawls’s theoretical bases are unique, and although the thrust of his thought is toward redistribution in a particularly zealous way, his broad descent from classical liberal thought is well illustrated by the analysis of Brian Crowley in The Self, the Individual and the Community. As Crowley points out, both Rawls and conservative capitalist F. A. Hayek, who obviously have very different views on redistributive policies, actually evidence great similarities in terms of their understandings of justice and the self. Their affinities regarding justice can most clearly be seen in Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Chapter 10, esp. p. 132, which in Crowley’s words is a passage ‘‘so Rawlsian in flavour that it might have been written by Rawls himself’’ (Crowley, The Self, The Individual and the Community, p. 201). This excerpt from the passage in Hayek which Crowley is referring to would seem to bear out such a description: The conclusion to which our considerations lead is thus that we should regard as the most desirable order of society one which we would choose if we knew that our initial position

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in it would be decided purely by chance (such as the fact of our being born into a particular family).

For an elaboration of the affinities between Rawlsean and Hayekian concepts of justice, see Crowley, The Self, The Individual and the Community, pp. 200–202. Pages 200–202 also include Crowley’s explanation of the similar anthropologies of Rawls and Hayek. Crowley locates Hayek in the liberal tradition of Kant and Rawls, but with the crucial anthropological difference of Hayek’s skepticism of the efficacy of human rationality. Hayek would prefer to allow the superior rationality of the market to indicate the values of rational choice, rather than Rawls’s hypothetical discovery procedure of the original position (see Crowley, p. 201). Crowley suggests that Hayek’s low view of human ratiocination is a product of Humean influence, and that his differences with Rawls are really more methodological than ideological in nature (Crowley, p. 201). See John Gray , Hayek on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Chapter 1, esp. p. 8, for a discussion of Hume’s influence on Hayek’s view of man. 55. See Wolff, Understanding Rawls, p. 20. 56. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 228. 57. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 79. 58. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 228. 59. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 79. 60. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 61. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 225. 62. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 85. 63. See Macintyre, After Virtue, p. 251. 64. Ibid. For a brief critical evaluation of Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice, see Hillel Steiner, ‘‘Justice and Entitlement.’’ Ethics, January 1977, pp. 150–152; Israel Kirzner, ‘‘Entrepreneurship, Entitlement and Economic Justice,’’ Eastern Economic Journal 4, No. 1 (January 1978). MacIntyre’s argument on this point strikes me as a bit unrealistic, for conquest and plunder of some sort have inevitably characterized the geographical residence of many people. It can hardly be historically established that a specific people or group has an original and morally untainted claim, and possession through time, to a particular parcel of land. Similarly, ‘‘principles of rectification’’ are practically impossible and notoriously flawed, given the finitude of human knowledge, the vicissitudes of social forces, and the unintended consequences of sweeping social policies. The more important point here, I think, is Nozick’s idea of ‘‘possession which is not illegitimate.’’ Providing that the resources possessed by an individual were not acquired by immoral actions committed by that individual, or obtained by immoral means which that individual knowingly and willfully participated in or allowed to function, and assuming he did not have the wherewithal to prevent such means from functioning, his possessions are legitimately held. Nozick is correct to deny that the concept of desert applies to an infinite regress of circumstances and conditions beyond the control of the individual. Thus, for example, inherited wealth—if freely bequeathed by its owner who himself obtained it through morally sound personal actions that were the product of his primarily self-generated character—is legitimately possessed.

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Certainly, institutions such as slavery and legal disenfranchisement have seriously negative consequences for their victims which indeed at least partly perdure, but macro-policies of compensation are more likely to be iatrogenic—to their intended beneficiaries and society as a whole—than truly restorative. In those situations where victims of systematic, de jure unfairness are individually identifiable and still living, direct economic compensation of them is warranted. Otherwise, the best and most comprehensively satisfying means of compensation is the creation and maintenance of strict legal equality, effective educational institutions, and a vigorous market economy that provides a context for anyone diligent to thrive. The pursuit of justice must be realistic and cognizant of the inevitably partial nature of its accomplishment. But none of the foregoing is inconsistent with the argument—which I accept— that America, with regard to black Americans descended from slaves, bears unique debts. The question is how to best satisfy those debts, and as I indicated in the preceding paragraph, legal, educational, and economic means, rather than redistributive and political, are preferable. 65. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 419. 66. Crowley, The Self, the Individual and the Community, pp. 203, 207–208. 67. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 214. 68. See Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 87–88. 69. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 311. 70. For a fine discussion of this theme in Rawls, as well as an examination of critical theory and postmodernism as general movements, see Stanley Raffel, Habermas, Lyotard and the Concept of Justice (London: Macmillan Press, 1992), esp. Chapter 3. 71. Besides the implausibility of Rawls’s conception of the self which we have been discussing, there is a basic self-refutational quality to Rawls’s general approach: if differences in individual welfare status are not legitimately possible in moral terms, how can it be that Rawls’s theory is morally superior to all others, and a citizenry is obliged to observe it? As Tibor Machan explains it, ‘‘On the one hand, then, no one is free to choose and gain moral credit, while on the other hand we should freely choose (and thus might be credited with) being on the side of justice. . . . [This] both denies and affirms that we have moral responsibilities the fulfillment of which makes us deserving of certain rewards.’’ See Tibor Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 80–81. For a radically egalitarian perspective on merit and desert, see Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 103–190. See also the broad defense of egalitarianism presented by Amy Gutmann in her work Liberal Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 72. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 104. 73. As an example, see the autobiography of neurosurgeon Ben Carson, with Cecil Murphey, Gifted Hands (New York: HarperCollins, 1993, first published in 1990 by Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, Mich.). 74. On income inequality generally, see Herbert Stein, ‘‘The Income Inequality Debate,’’ The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 1996. For interesting commentary on this general topic, see the discussions by Daniel Bell, Robert Nozick, and James Tobin, ‘‘If Inequality Is Inevitable What Can Be Done About It ?,’’ New York Times,

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January 3, 1982, p. E5 and Roy E. Cordato, ‘‘Income and the Question of Rights,’’ The Freeman, January 1997, pp. 12–13. For comprehensive analyses of inequality as a concept, see Amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) and Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). For presentation and commentary of Michael Walzer’s unique concept of ‘‘complex equality,’’ under which inequalities are permitted in different spheres of life while a larger equality between citizens is still preserved, see Walzer, Spheres of Justice and David Miller and Michael Walzer, eds., Pluralism, Justice, and Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a critique of redistributing wealth as a means of compensating for financial inequality, see the thoughts of David Horowitz, ‘‘Redistributing Wealth: Unfair and Useless,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1997, p. B7. 75. A point well-discussed by D. D. Raphael, Problems of Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 119 ff. 76. The legitimately indigent being those who because of disability or genuine trauma cannot work, not simply those who are able-bodied but choose not to work. 77. See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 78. John Gray, introduction to Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1990), p. xvii. 79. Quoted in Walter Williams, ‘‘The Expensive, Futile Quest for ‘Cosmic Justice’,’’ The Orange County Register, January 28, 1997, p. Metro 7. 80. William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 12–13. 81. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 83–84. 82. See David Horowitz’s compelling personal and political memoir, Radical Son (New York: The Free Press, 1997) for biographical evidence of this practice. 83. As columnist Don Feder well argued, such fantasies about religious conservatives are baseless. See Don Feder, Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 84. See note 74 in Chapter 3. I have no citation for Prager’s remark, as I heard it one day on his radio talkshow, broadcast Monday through Friday from noon to 3:00 P.M. on station KABC in Los Angeles. Issues of related concern are frequently covered in his bimonthly newsletter ‘‘The Prager Perspective,’’ published at 10573 Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90064. 85. Christina Hoff Sommers has documented numerous outright lies of the feminist establishment in the pursuit of its goals, and former abortionist Bernard Nathanson acknowledges the lies told in the drive to legalize abortion. See respectively, Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 13–15 and the following works of Nathanson: Aborting America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979); The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality (New York: Frederick Fell, 1983); and The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 86. This point, minus the qualifiers, is clearly made by Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 85–86. 87. Of course, I am bracketing here politically repressive or underdeveloped

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regimes, slavery, and other social phenomena that directly and forcibly constrain liberty. My discussion here assumes a Western, First-World context. 88. See Bovard, Lost Rights, pp. 259–292 for discussion and illustration. 89. For discussion on this general point, see the chapter ‘‘Character and Community: The Problem of Broken Windows,’’ in James Q. Wilson, On Character (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1995). 90. Lawrence Mead, The New Politics of Poverty, (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 146. 91. Henry, In Defense of Elitism, p. 14.

II PRACTICAL

3 THE WORK OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM We are where we are because whenever we had a choice to make, we have chosen the alternative that required the least effort at the moment. . . . [We] have dissipated, like wastrels and drunkards, the inheritance of freedom and order that came to [us] from hardworking, thrifty, faithful, believing, and brave men. —Walter Lippmann

There is no question that contemporary liberalism has radically changed American culture since the 1960s. As David Blankenhorn, Allan Bloom, Robert Bork, Dinesh D’Souza, William A. Henry III, Philip K. Howard, Myron Magnet, Christina Hoff Sommers, and numerous other critics of contemporary liberalism have documented, many of these changes have not enhanced our social life.1 The precise reasons why many of the varied social innovations of modern liberalism have been destructive are complex and far beyond our constraints here to examine comprehensively.2 But in an effort to more fully convey the flavor of modern liberalism, its animating impulses, and their consequences, we will briefly discuss four persistent postures of today’s liberal mind, utopian, irreligious, selfrighteous, and intolerant, with an eye toward their consequences. Then we will look more specifically at the general subjects of race and abortion, contemplating the profound depths to which our national life in those spheres has descended. THE UTOPIAN POSTURE With its inveterate utopian bent, modern liberalism tends to overmanage social life and intervene in human interactions with statist manipulation of social forces. Rather than trust the free hand of the market

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or free associations to manage individual and social interactions, contemporary liberalism reflexively looks to the power of the state to enforce its normative vision.3 This is mainly because of its conception of government as a highly qualified, desired, and efficient supplier of what people need, whether morally or materially. But this perspective, in my view, is dissonant with the most persistent inclinations and deepest sentiments of human beings. It is a mistake to believe government is our friend. Top-down, megastructure-to-citizen government is inevitably alienating and dehumanizing. The misery of our inner cities, with their managed populations, testifies to that. The impressive collapse of state-heavy civilizations within the last few years is an object lesson in the truth that biggovernment suffocates peoples’ initiative, creativity, and enterprise. It tends to undermine citizens’ personal and social competencies, just as political self-government tends to enhance them. Disconnected from a clear sense of self-determination and self-responsibility, human beings become passive and frustrated. Writing over a century ago, Frenchman and American national biographer Alexis de Tocqueville saw this tendency, and noted that the American penchant for free and voluntary association as a means of political problem solving was the great genius of the new nation.4 Today’s liberalism fails to see that being a cog in the mechanism of a great government simply is not valuable to people. Any leader who believes that a disaffected people only need better management in order to be content is quite mistaken. A public malaise—like the kind so plainly apparent in the United States—is more the result of crises in culture and social ethics than it is a deficit in federal control over people’s daily lives. But the utopian mind misses this, wanting instead to believe it can control outcomes, and so it accordingly politicizes solutions ad nauseum. It is self-condemned to that eternal optimism that unceasingly drives for the ‘‘right mix,’’ never willing to consign government to a short legislative leash and modest civic aspirations, leaving people to their own devices for forging a measure of satisfaction and contentment. Seriously lacking here is an abiding awareness of the tenuousness of human societies and the fragility of the social contract, not to mention the great disasters governments can produce and have indeed wrought, unwittingly, under the banner of reform. Certainly, a citizenry should remind themselves and their governors that it is not the end of the human being to be a subject of government. People ultimately do not find that fulfilling. It does not answer to the aspirations of the human spirit or to our uneasy sense that our personal conduct deeply matters, even—or especially—when we wish it did not. Being efficiently managed will never confer meaning or satisfaction on human beings, it does not make them feel or believe that they are truly

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participating in something of genuine goodness and deep significance. Yet it is this very sense that we seem to order our whole lives to achieve. As we indicated earlier, all politics presuppose a vision of the self, and it is the great folly of modern liberals that they often exchange sober attention to the anthropological for overenthusiastic attention to the structural. We see this in Bill Clinton, with his persistent incanting of the ‘‘change’’ mantra in the 1992 election, as though ‘‘change’’ was by definition desirable. He and others like him err by trying—through the manipulation of delivery systems—to bring to people that which cannot be externally delivered: personal satisfaction with one’s life and a firm sense of one’s rootedness in moral social order. Generally, it seems that the former can only be the product of introspection, and the latter of mutually meaningful voluntary associations—both in intimate personal relationships and in larger social ties. This is one reason why Michael Lerner’s and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ‘‘politics of meaning’’ was so misguided.5 But these distinctions are largely lost on those who make their livings designing programs and constructing policies for the hordes, since their own interests are served by the widespread proliferation of government-as-social-savior hopes and expectations. These experts’ commitment to ‘‘change’’ is often not constrained by the realities of human affectivity. Abstract, nonquantifiable considerations like human inclinations and abiding dispositions have always been the bete noire of social engineers. The alternative philosophical orientation, political realism—embodied today in American conservatism generally—does not forbid essential reform or cement the status quo. However, it does wisely remind us about the persistent reality of the unintended consequences attached to policy changes and of the unwieldiness of massive bureaucracy. Ironically, one of the first casualties in Bill Clinton’s and modern liberalism’s brand of utopianism was the classically liberal ‘‘thin’’ theory of the good. Its claim is that citizens should be left to pursue their own vision of the good inscribed within a broad circle of liberty, and responsibility, unencumbered by any strongly particularized ideas of what constitutes the human summum bonum. This is the historically democratic manner of allowing autonomous individuals to achieve self-fulfillment individually. Yet in a subtle but real way, this most American of traditions is threatened by the ever-encroaching system under construction by the Clinton presidency and modern liberalism as a movement. Lying behind the increasing array of specific programs is an understanding—nascent and perhaps unarticulated, but still strong and particular— of what people deserve, what human life should be, and how it should be lived. Now these are questions any politics must engage at some level, but undoubtedly the more comprehensive the government, the more tightly defined the answers to all these questions become. As this spec-

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ificity grows, we ebb further away from the individuated ‘‘pursuit of happiness,’’ and paradoxically, from the historically liberal roots Bill Clinton and contemporary liberalism claim but have betrayed. With so many busy projects designed to ‘‘make life better,’’ President Clinton and those of his ilk risk overdefining the shape of American public life, imposing the peculiar, idealistic normativity of contemporary liberalism.6 As an antidote to this overweening confidence in the state, all such would-be reformers should heed the value of voluntary associations and peoples’ capacity to address and manage their distinctive problems and circumstances through their own agency.7 This confidence is central to American self-government and is lacking in what Thomas Sowell describes as ‘‘unconstrained’’ visionaries, those who believe that the control mechanisms of anonymous bureaucratic structures are best able to diagnose, prescribe, and solve.8 But government can only make people so happy, and it ought not try to function as a kind of Grand Caretaker. The wisdom of this limited state lies in the implicit recognition that there is a definite limit to the communitas it can yield. Presidential tinkering and micro-managing in an effort to ‘‘make it all work’’—in the belief that this will make people happy—is a sure way to fail, and in the process upset and alienate just about everyone. Yet those in President Clinton’s generation and political tradition are addicted to the governing process, driven by an idealism that seeks fulfillment in the political rather than the personal. Bereft of a practical, realistic anthropology and the tempered politics it yields, contemporary liberalism presses on, forging a mess in the image of a now anachronistic—and always problematic— sixties-type idealism.9 One obvious reason for this inevitable failure is simply that governmental performance on a mass scale is almost always inefficient. For example, the city of Washington, D.C., long a laboratory for statist governance, is currently in an unprecedented condition of disrepair. One of the post offices there was recently closed because rats were eating a significant percentage of the mail. The city-administered nursing home for indigents, which has 300 D.C. workers on the payroll to care for just twenty-eight residents, is being closed after seven of its residents had to have limbs amputated when their bedsores became infected. In the cockroach-ridden D.C. city morgue, which is in need of $800,000 in repairs, corpses are stored everywhere, including hallways. On any given day, 30 percent of the city’s police cars are out of service, for lack of money to repair them. And, of course, uncollected trash mounts up on the capital’s potholed streets in summer, and snow goes unplowed in winter.10 Not surprisingly, this kind of government inefficiency and the utopian current driving so much policy construction by liberal politicians has enflamed the antigovernment passions of many conservatives and libertarians. Indeed, in American life today some citizens harbor a deep

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hostility toward the work of federal, state, and local governments. The historic American defiance of statism and bureaucratic encroachment has permutated into an active animus against the governing process. The increase in dangerous militia activities and the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, by disgruntled self-styled ‘‘patriots,’’ have all brought attention to this phenomenon. But today’s conservatism, the most promising alternative to contemporary liberalism, faces a serious contradiction. In strongly reacting against statism, it risks disabling political government, which is an important vehicle of character formation.11 Anarchy is certainly not an attractive alternative to the overenthusiastic machinations of contemporary liberalism. As George Will explains, The contradiction in today’s conservatism is, happily, a contingent, not a necessary, aspect of conservatism. But it can be a crippling contingency if it is not corrected. It is this: Conservatism is advocating not just disrespect for many activities of government, but even blanket disdain for government, and hence for the political vocation. However, conservatism’s vision of civic virtue depends on more than adherence to a particular policy agenda. It depends on respect, even reverence, for our political regime— for our constitutional order understood as a formative enterprise.12

It is contemporary liberalism’s anthropological optimism and utopian confidence in the comprehensive malleability of human nature that supports its perfectionism, the force that drives it to the statist micromanagement some have found so alienating. The old motto, ‘‘The perfect is the enemy of the good,’’ holds no sway over the liberal mind, convinced as it is that social forces can be easily and precisely manipulated. Similarly, such a perspective is comparatively unconcerned about the latent versus manifest functions of its policy programs.13 And, as one would expect, the optimistic anthropocentrism of the utopian mind is closed off to transcendent religious social critiques, and religious beliefs and practices in general, especially those of a traditionalistic, Judeo-Christian nature. This is especially tragic, because it is the religious voice that is best able to pierce the utopian fantasies of statist liberalism. THE IRRELIGIOUS POSTURE In 1984 Richard John Neuhaus clearly demonstrated in his book, The Naked Public Square, that modern American liberalism evinces a systematic bias against public expressions of religiosity and deliberately resists the introduction of religious critiques—even mere religious themes—into debates over public policy and social organization.14 But the irreligiosity

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of modern liberalism is selective. The religious left, seldom a target of the media critiques and scrutiny routinely directed toward their counterparts on the right, fits quite well into the political program of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, many of its organizations constitute part of the net of liberal interest groups and bureaucratic bodies pressing the causes of ‘‘liberty,’’ ‘‘autonomy,’’ and ‘‘compassion.’’ In many ways, on policy questions, liberal religionists are indistinguishable from secular liberals.15 But the jettisoning of traditional, Judeo-Christian religious practice by contemporary elites has been ill-advised both personally and socially. Still, even though their irreligious inclinations have been in many ways culturally influential, the religiosity of the general public persists.16 The Personal Value of Religious Belief In the personal realm, the rejection of religion by opinion-makers is harmful because it can discourage people, especially youth, from pursuing and embracing the psycho-emotional stability and spiritual welfare that religious commitment can provide. For example, it has become common to hear of studies bearing out traditional Judeo-Christian understandings of family life. One study showed that men who have a wife they sleep with are more apt to enjoy health, happiness, and prosperity. Another study claimed that divorced men are more likely than other men to experience health problems and early death.17 And the fact that the mortality rate of single men is higher than that of married men has been widely documented.18 But perhaps the least discussed baleful consequence of contemporary liberalism’s cultural signaling that religious faith is ‘‘unsophisticated,’’ ‘‘unreflective,’’ or useless is the loss of individual meaning and eternal vision so well provided by traditional, structured Judeo-Christian religious belief. The following personal interlude is a story that illustrates the priceless sense of humanity and perseverance that earnest faith can uniquely instill within a person, particularly one facing great hardship. Miles. When I first met my late friend Miles, about fifteen years ago, he was already bedridden and immobile. Multiple sclerosis had seized his body, and except for slowly blinking his eyes and moving his jaws to chew or speak in his nearly inaudible, whispery voice, he was totally paralyzed. But his mind was fine—in fact, better than fine. He was able to recount the details—sometimes quaint, sometimes salacious—of his fraternity days at the University of Missouri some thirty years ago, as well as the emotions he felt when he learned he had MS, and when his wife, care-weary and fearful of the physical devolution that was still to come, finally left him. He also had a relentless, searching inquisitiveness about current affairs and ultimate issues: Why is everyone so angry these

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days? How come cars are so expensive now? How can I serve God motionless in bed? What will happen when I die? When I would see him at the convalescent hospital where he lived, I would always find him staring at some distant point I could not see. He shared a room—a different room each month it seemed, for he was constantly being moved for no apparent reason—with one or two other anonymous individuals, ancient people who seemed always to be asleep, if not lost, babbling in their senility. When he noticed I was in the room, Miles would hail me with an enthusiastic wheeze, ‘‘Young Brad!’’ Although his disease had reduced Miles to a 6'2" long mannequin-like shell, totally dependent on others for all of the most basic bodily functions, he maintained a dignity and sense of wisdom about him. He had experienced much of life before falling ill and had now spent years reflecting on it, watching the world flicker before him on the television set that was always on in his room. Everything from mind-numbing game shows to Sally Jesse Raphael to the local news (which he referred to as ‘‘the nightly murder report’’) passed before him, subject to his critique distilled from experiences most human beings mercifully never know. He saw in American life today the perennial story of human acquisitiveness: a self-defeating insatiability that was a hell on earth, chaining its prisoners to permanent dissatisfaction. Devout in belief, Miles unknowingly echoed the great Fathers of the church in lamenting the inevitability of human self-destruction when the moorings to God are not established and tended. His worldview quite completely presented Augustine’s humble declaration of divine reliance: ‘‘[W]ithout Thee, what am I but a guide to my own destruction?’’19 But such reflection was by no means an inevitability for Miles. He could have simply passed up on thinking about life or submerged his mind in what anyone who beheld his state would reckon a quite reasonable self-pity. Yet Miles had invested substantial effort, mostly unaided by books of any kind since he was unable to read to himself, in pondering the frustrations and psychology of contemporary living. Becoming something of a mandatorily cloistered contemplative, he always counseled unremitting patience and persistence as solutions to problems, from the personal to the interpersonal and societal. But his blend of personal optimism and tenacity was not of a piece with the saccharine, ‘‘inspirational’’ platitudes of the many self-help gurus, motivational speakers, and television ministers who have installed themselves in American popular consciousness. To Miles, hardship and suffering—and our ignorance of God’s purposes for allowing them to come upon us—had to be borne in the unadorned confidence of God’s love, justice, and omniscience. He saw this as an obligation, a true Christian duty that he always reminded himself—with the purest of sincerity—was not more difficult than what Jesus had endured for him. Giving

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in to complaining and self-pity, though not irrational (in his case), was still faithless and morally wrong—not just unproductive, pessimistic, or uninspiring. We were to ask not ‘‘Why, Lord?’’ but ‘‘What, Lord?’’ ‘‘What would You have me learn and understand from this experience?’’ This is not to say that Miles never sank into depression. When he had to start taking all his meals through a tube connected to his stomach, he was angry and sad. In part, this was because it meant an end to his beloved cheeseburgers—an important delicacy to him that was basically his only source of physical sensation and pleasure. But it was also because it was yet a further development of his MS, another way in which the disease had taken from him one more avenue of contact with the world, a means of self-assertion, however primary. And when his mother—who had talked with him on his speaker-telephone every night for decades—died, he became morose and desolate. ‘‘Who is going to call me, who will I talk to?’’ he once cried, like a small child. It was at this point in his life that his psychological agony—which had always been more acute to him than his physical pain—became its worst. ‘‘Why won’t God just let me die?’’ he would ask, his pale blue eyes slightly dilating with the question, underlining the intensity of his bewilderment. It seemed to him that all which could be taken from him had been, and that of all the appropriate times to die, this was surely the best. But still he lived on, a well of insight and simple, stubborn faith. No one who passed by his room seemed to know the treasure that was in there, the stark, unglamorous recommendations for living Miles had tried, tested, and applied. The staff at the convalescent hospital was not able to interact with Miles on much more than a rudimentary level, since most of them were very recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who spoke and understood little or sometimes no English. Beyond the bars to meaningful friendship that this language barrier created, it was also dangerous for Miles. Unable to communicate with his immediate caregivers (charge nurses spoke English, but they were rarely eager or at hand to help), Miles couldn’t tell them when he was lying in his excrement and needed to be changed, or when he was drowning in his phlegm and needed to be suctioned. For the most part, the immigrants who staffed the convalescent hospital were compassionate and diligent, doing unpleasant work for little more than minimum wage. But they would get tired too, and the opportunity to talk with their coworkers about the details of their common struggle in ‘‘El Norte’’—or sometimes just to flirt—occasionally meant that patients like Miles languished unnoticed. The convalescent hospital was, by any standard, an unpleasant life for Miles. Yet, he never wanted to take his own life or attempt to have someone discreetly dispatch him. Such an idea was anathema to him

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because he recognized God’s dominion over human life—whatever its circumstances—and the capitulation to darkness such a decision constituted. What he wanted was to live well, not to die. He wanted to serve God. When he could not see how that could be accomplished, and when he was at his lowest, he would ask God to take him, but always out of a sense of a life lived to its utter completion, not out of a sense of unredeemed suffering, hopelessness, or bitter self-pity. When he finally did die, about a year after his mother, his relatives were visibly relieved. No more visits to the hospital, no more haggling with the apathetic charge nurses over the standards of care, no more sharing in Miles’s frustration and wondering what all their lives would have been like without MS. At Miles’s memorial service, his brother recounted a story about a time shortly after Miles’s sixth birthday, when he and Miles were walking to the store. Excited at the prospects his sixth year held, Miles said that his life was just beginning. ‘‘When you’re four and five, you don’t really know what to do, and how to act. But when you’re six, you do, and so your life is really just starting.’’ Some fifty years after he spoke those words, Miles’s life has truly started anew, heralded by such a noble preamble.20 The Social Value of Religious Belief The most apparent consequence of the liberal elites’ public disparagement of traditional religious conviction and its perspective on public policy and cultural controversies is the marginalization of its contributions to the nation’s civic life historically and to our current social exigencies, for example, welfare reform.21 The conservative religious voice of our culture is not taken seriously by those who hold the most cognitively influential positions (for example, professors, editors at the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, print and electronic commentators, network programmers, and film producers). As a result, the ideas uniquely residing in traditional religious values have difficulty gaining a widespread and comprehensive hearing.22 The country at large is the worse for this selectivity, for some extremely potent and valuable social criticisms have stemmed from American piety. Abolition and the civil rights movement—both led by Christians, with civil rights spearheaded by a theologically traditional clergyman whose advocacy was utterly imbued with religious values, rhetoric, and symbolism—are the paradigmatic examples. I would now like to take a brief look at one example of a very successful conservative Christian organization’s approach to solving the social problems of welfare, drug addiction, and homelessness. This section concludes with two short discussions further illustrating the general social value of religious commitment, as well as an explanation for the

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popularity of the reenergized social phenomenon of the evangelical crusade, and how it may affect future political alignments. CityTeam. When the city of San Jose, California, launched an ambitious program to renovate its downtown neighborhoods, its first task was to move the homeless out of the area. But to do that, the city fathers knew they had to move the CityTeam Ministries rescue mission out of its downtown home, since its chapel and coffeehouse programs regularly drew the weary and wayward. It is a measure of the success and integrity of CityTeam Ministries that the city of San Jose—with virtually no public opposition—did not hesitate to pay the $11.5 million relocation costs of CityTeam. Patrick Robertson, the president of CityTeam Ministries, was not surprised. ‘‘We have purposely cultivated a good relationship with the city of San Jose,’’ he said, ‘‘and they know we are committed to helping people recover their lives.’’23 CityTeam, a nondenominational Christian ministry, operated through several buildings it owns around the city of San Jose, carries out that commitment in many ways, including the rescue mission, a shelter for homeless women and their children, a family services center providing food and furniture to impoverished families, an annual summer camp for hundreds of urban poor kids, drug and alcohol recovery programs, English and literacy classes, weekly Bible clubs for kids, a home for unwed pregnant women, and occasional special programs such as ‘‘On the Right Track,’’ which provides a free haircut, backpack, and school supplies to hundreds of underprivileged children preparing to return to school. All that CityTeam does is free to the poor—and free to the city of San Jose. No wonder San Jose mayor Susan Hammer has publicly stated her support for CityTeam. The group does a lot of good and doesn’t cost the city of San Jose or the county of Santa Clara anything at all. This is all made possible by CityTeam’s massive volunteer base— about 3,000 people drawn from area churches and civic groups—along with its 75 full-time staff members. They operate all of CityTeam’s programs, and the ministry does not accept any money from government sources. But the aspect of its work that is causing CityTeam’s fame to spread—so much so that recently a church in the Philadelphia area asked CityTeam to start a ministry there—is its comprehensive approach to treating the drug- and alcohol-addicted homeless. CityTeam’s approach to compassion is overtly religious; it maintains that true recovery is a spiritual issue and must be spiritually based. It is this guiding conviction that sets CityTeam apart from other secular approaches to helping the homeless and addicted. ‘‘Most groups that try to help the homeless and addicted do so with a liberal sympathy that is undirected, that just shovels money out there,’’ Robertson explained. ‘‘But this ‘we care’ attitude is actually harmful to the homeless, it aids

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their dysfunction. Their root problems are not economic, they’re internal. They need to start taking responsibility for their lives, and they need to be willing to accept guidelines, and to accept personal accountability for themselves. We insist that they do that.’’24 And there is no doubt that the CityTeam philosophy of Biblical accountability has produced impressive results, with over 65 percent of CityTeam graduates—people who were hard-core, lifetime addicts— clean and sober one year after their completion of the twelve-month long CityTeam drug and alcohol recovery program. Steven, a 45-year-old drug addict whose weathered face bears the scars of addiction, is a case in point. ‘‘I went through half a dozen re-hab programs before entering CityTeam’s, and it is by far the best one I have experienced. I have learned more about myself during the last year here than I had learned in all my 44 years before.’’25 Pat Robertson explained, ‘‘We are trying to be a mirror, and say, look at yourself, do you like this picture, what else would you like, where else would you like to be?’’26 This confrontational approach bears fruit with people who really want to change, he maintains. The essential uniqueness of CityTeam’s method is the comprehensive, Christ-centered nature of its program which takes hold of peoples’ lives and brings genuine change. The organization requires chapel attendance and participation in recovery and literacy classes. CityTeam has volunteers from local churches that form friendships with the men and who help them become involved at a local church. It sees itself as teaching self-sufficiency, preparing people for independence, so that when they have completed the program they already have a network of friendships and support relationships that can sustain them. So in a very real sense CityTeam is out to change lives, not merely ease some immediate pain or material need. This is in sharp contrast to the conventional, secular liberal approach to homelessness and addiction. Robertson explains, ‘‘Liberals are out to alleviate pain. They are not out to demonstrate productive results, they’re just out to alleviate pain. But sometimes pain is a very good thing that forces people to look at their lives, and start making some right decisions.’’27 This philosophy clearly worked with Ray, a middle-aged man whose long battle with drug addiction had basically paralyzed his life. He said, ‘‘CityTeam has helped me deal with my inner problems, and I know those are the real source of my trouble.’’28 CityTeam staff members are able to bring hurting people to these realizations by showing them that their concern for them is sincere. Hakim, an ex-addict, is one program participant who was especially touched by the compassion shown to him by CityTeam. He is a middle-aged African immigrant who speaks English haltingly and with a thick accent. His eyes welled with tears as he said in a firm voice, ‘‘The people here at CityTeam care for me. They

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have shown me love. No one has ever done that for me before. I was lost before I came here, I was dead. But I have found life here, the Lord has given me life through this ministry.’’29 Perhaps the city of San Jose’s recent Guadalupe Creek Project offers the most illustrative contrast between the comprehensive methods of CityTeam and the more common band-aid approach of city social service agencies. In 1990 San Jose wanted to create a park at Guadalupe Creek near its downtown. But this area was a major homeless encampment, with several hundred people living there. The city brought together numerous public agencies, including the departments of social service, welfare, housing, mental health, job development, and the California State Employment office. They provided the homeless people who had been living at the creek with virtually everything they would need to reenter society: social security numbers, identification papers, bus passes, and free Section Eight welfare housing, with the city providing a security deposit and first month’s rent for an apartment. ‘‘We had large tents set up all around the creek,’’ said one official in the San Jose Housing Department who wished to remain unidentified, ‘‘it was like a carnival.’’ But many of the homeless that the city and county had worked so hard to relocate did not fare well in the community. ‘‘One person used the apartment we had placed him in as a party house, and he sold drugs out of the place,’’ the city official said. ‘‘The landlord was pretty upset with us.’’30 Commenting on the city’s Guadalupe Creek program and the comparative approaches of CityTeam and conventional government-centered methods, Robertson said, They meant well, but they weren’t dealing with the core issues. There is this whole ‘‘homeless movement’’ in America that thinks that the root problem of homelessness is not having a house. The root problem is not houselessness, the real problem is that these folks don’t have the mentality of a home. They’ve cut themselves off from family. The overwhelming majority of them are addicts also, and their addiction causes them to become involved in criminal activities. Nobody is dealing with these real problems, they’re thinking if we just put these people in houses we have dealt with the problem.

He continued, But in the case of the Guadalupe Creek program, within months, many of the apartments were trashed, and these people were back on the streets, because the root problem of their emotional, mental, and personal state of well-being was not addressed. There is a backlash against homelessness in this country today, because people are seeing that we’ve spent millions of dollars on the problem of homelessness, but it’s not getting any better, it’s

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getting worse. More and more people are going to start recognizing that you have to deal with the root problems, and that is the only thing that can really make a difference.31

Robertson went on to explain the basic flaw in the contemporary liberal philosophy of compassion: ‘‘Liberals regularly assert that they care about the homeless, the addicted and people who are hurting. And they do. But all of us need to understand the implications of our actions. If we are not careful, in trying to show our compassion and demonstrate how much we care, we will rob people of their independence; we will prevent them from engaging in the necessary personal struggle that creates their independence and self-sufficiency.’’32 He continued, I like to use this illustration: a boy was walking along and he came across a cocoon on the ground, partially open, and inside was the butterfly, agonizing and thrashing around trying to get out of the cocoon. The little boy sees this and decides he’s going to help the butterfly, so he reaches down and carefully, gently opens up the cocoon so the butterfly can go free. He does this with good intentions, but the reality is that he has now cursed that butterfly, because it is the struggle to emerge from the cocoon that causes blood to flow to the butterfly’s wings, so they can mature properly, allowing the butterfly to fly. Without the struggle to break free of the cocoon, the butterfly will never fully develop, and it won’t survive. This is an illustration of what is wrong with our welfare system, and with liberal thinking: it is rightly motivated in that liberals care deeply, and they are trying to show their compassion by helping people escape their pain. But in pain, and in the process of our struggles, are some of the greatest lessons that we will ever learn in life. Liberals don’t see that the process of the struggle is as critical to what the individual becomes as is the end result. You must not rob people of the process of their struggle, because that is how they grow. Had the prodigal son not gone hungry, he would have never gone back to his father, he would have continued slopping hogs. If there had been somebody there to say ‘‘Oh, you poor boy, come over to my house and I’ll give you clean clothes and take care of you, and help you get back to your life,’’ then nobody would have been challenging him in terms of the long-term implications of the decisions he had made, and he would have continued in that destructive lifestyle. He had to go through the process of understanding that he had sinned against his father, he had blown all of his money, and his father’s hogs were eating better than he was. After that process, he came to his senses and said ‘‘I’m going to go home.’’ So, we need to help conservatives understand that they should truly care about people, but we need to help liberals understand that sometimes their acts of compassion are sentencing the individual to a lifetime of defeat.33

Religious Belief as Social Critique. But beyond specific, practical contributions such as the religiously inspired work of CityTeam, the larger

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dimension of prophetic social critique is also lost when religious voices— especially conservative ones, as they are the most contrary to the contemporary zeitgeist—are muffled.34 Perhaps the social value of a transcendent perspective—which is often overlooked by those on the left, and sometimes by those on the right—can be seen by reflecting on the 1996 national elections. Once again the vigorous involvement of religious conservatives in this past election cycle was controversial, and we again heard the perennial debate over the propriety of religion in politics. However, the main antagonists in this regular argument—religious conservatives and secular liberals—consistently fail to give careful consideration to the possibility that religion, and specifically belief in the personal infinite God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, has a social utility regardless of its truth or falsity. Certainly, theists maintain that God actually exists, and great minds through the centuries have offered a battery of presentable reasons in support of that proposition.35 But for our common social purposes—in a comprehensively pluralistic country—what matters most is not the metaphysical truth of theism, but rather that the concept of God itself affects human conduct—generally for the better. It does this primarily by holding before us the image of a perfect and impartial judge who always sees what we do, and who promises to reward good and punish evil. This resonates with our deepest moral sentiments: we intuitively know that how we behave matters (even if we think no one is watching), and we yearn for justice. We want the good rewarded and the bad punished. A consciousness of God-as-judge confers order on what is for us an often chaotic world and helps us reckon human behavior as meaningful, and not merely an exhibition of random absurdity. Furthermore, the diffused belief in a transcendent God also underlines ontological human equality. Bigoted claims to racial or ethnic superiority shrink before the image of a personal, infinite creator of all persons. We come to recognize our ultimate commonality and shared human experience when we understand ourselves not as heroic self-made, wholly self-determining masters of the universe, but rather as imperfect creatures of the same Maker, mutually challenged by the fears, complexities, and promises of life. The abiding belief in God also humanizes us. This is a paradox: by focusing on God, we become more concerned about people. By recognizing God as beyond all immanent, human constructions, we suddenly come to a greater valuation of earthly relationships, understanding them as a sacred gift to be cherished, not simply as our chosen arrangements, instruments serving our own calculated ends. The fact is, human nature is not admirable. Genuinely virtuous peo-

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ple—and the good society that can result—can only be formed by the practice of habits inspired by knowledge of the profound gravity of our lives, and the anticipation of divine judgment and reward. Acknowledgment of the social benefits of belief in God could lead religious conservatives and secular liberals to a substantial common ground: the recognition that we need neither a religious government nor a secular society. The former understanding is appealing to secularists and should be accepted by religious people because they know true faith cannot be coerced and must have a wide latitude of religious liberty in order to flourish. The latter realization is appealing to religious conservatives and should be accepted by secular liberals because it does not constitute any establishment of religion or actual imposition of particular belief, but it does humanize our social order as nothing else can. It simply acknowledges the religious voice in human society and the general need for human beings to sense that they are accountable to someone beyond themselves for their behavior. As our inhumanity to one another attests, when we become a law unto ourselves we are notoriously lenient judges. This historical reality should compel us to welcome religious critiques of political life and to be open to the shafts of light the sacred may cast on the profane. Promise Keepers. One religious movement that has received substantial media notice is Promise Keepers, the evangelical Christian Men’s movement.36 It continues to attract national attention and has been hailed as a valuable instance of religious renovation of civic life.37 But it is certainly not embraced by American feminists. One would think that every woman would want to hear the man in her life sincerely affirm to her, ‘‘I will respect you, I will be faithful to you, I will provide for you and your children.’’ But that is not the case. Promise Keepers vigorously advocates these commitments, and so it generates significant hostility from much of the liberal cogniscenti, particularly women. Most basically, the movement’s feminist critics are opposed to Promise Keepers’ implicit gender traditionalism—the idea that men and women generally have different social and familial roles, that these roles tend to reflect inherent psycho-emotional differences, and that men and women generally feel more fulfilled when they perform their respective roles.38 They are angered by the supposition that a man should lead his family, and they see the ethic of chivalry that the Promise Keepers outlook represents as an oppressive and galling artifact of times past, when women were locked out of positions of social and economic power, doomed merely to cook and clean in their husband’s shadow. But American feminism’s myopic jihad against gender traditionalism is increasingly straining the patience of women and men. In the crucible of growing economic pressure and an unraveling of social civility, they have come to see each other not as opponents in a zero-sum contest for

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professional success, but rather as partners in the ultimate human project of forging solid families and personal contentment in a violent and coarsening world. Mainstream feminism’s continuing drive to invert traditional gender roles is seen as anachronistic and irrelevant by a growing number of women whose deepest concerns center on their families rather than their careers. Indeed, according to a recent Parents magazine survey, nearly half of working mothers said they envied stay-at-home mothers, but only 11 percent of at-home mothers envied working women.39 Yet feminist icon Gloria Steinem, in a recent Smith College graduation speech, commended the graduating young women about to launch their careers for ‘‘becoming the men you once would have wanted to marry,’’ and she lamented that ‘‘too few men are becoming the women they want to marry.’’40 But to the vast sea of women beyond Gloria Steinem’s insular island of gender revolution, the hope of marriage to a man who will be a faithful and committed provider is very important, and for them Promise Keepers is a much-welcomed affirmation of an older order’s wisdom. Promise Keepers constitutes a reassertion of traditional, servantcentered masculinity (set in the context of evangelical Christianity). It is therefore a much needed antidote to the anomizing strains of contemporary American life which have alienated so many men from women, their children, and self-responsibility. Today many American men are abandoning responsible masculinity, with these frightening consequences: rampant fatherlessness (40 percent of American children are living apart from their father, says sociologist David Blankenhorn);41 outof-wedlock births (which are currently about 30 percent of all births nationwide);42 and juvenile violence (between 1982 and 1991 the juvenile arrest rate for murder increased a staggering 93 percent).43 While the amelioration of such massive social pathologies must be broad based, serious talk of masculinity which emphasizes self-responsibility, personal integrity, and sexual restraint can begin to compensate for the socialization into sound masculinity that is so lacking in American society. Promise Keepers provides this compensation and so serves a vital social purpose. Dissident feminist Camille Paglia captured the fundamental paradox of gender differences when she wrote, ‘‘A woman simply is, but a man must become.’’44 Authentic masculinity—that is, a masculinity that is able to cherish children, respect women, and assertively express itself nonviolently—must be learned. The Promise Keepers movement should be applauded, especially by women, for seeking to articulate—through the moral and religious resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition—the true meaning of manhood in what can only be judged to be an unmanly time. A Harvest of Discontent. Similar to Promise Keepers, but organizationally unrelated, is the annual series of evangelical crusades held at

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stadiums across the country each summer, particularly in southern California, called the Harvest Crusades. These gatherings are oriented primarily toward baby boomers and their children, and are strongly conservative in both religious and political tone, though they are not always overtly political. Appealing to the growing interest in religion among baby boomers, as well as providing a clear path to individual fulfillment and moral assurance amidst what is widely perceived as an American cultural crisis, these rallies tend to draw younger, enthusiastic crowds.45 Important political consequences flow from these annual gatherings of evangelical Christians and those contemplating such identification, consequences that the national press has generally ignored. Overwhelmingly, the Crusades draws and produces conservative evangelicals—that is, the ‘‘religious right,’’ in the parlance of today’s political acrimony. The political profile of such religious believers is wellknown. They are almost uniformly pro-life, disapproving of homosexuality, supportive of school voucher programs and prayer in public schools, creationist, and suspicious of large, activist government. Thus, in effect, the evangelical Harvest Crusades directly yield recruits for the Culture War, people whose religious beliefs incline them decisively to the right on many of the most contentious issues in American society. And it does so in substantial numbers. The gathering in Anaheim in 1995 attracted approximately 175,000 people in four days, a better turnout than the California Angels baseball team had in the entire month of June.46 But perhaps more important than the sheer number of people inadvertently drafted for the American Kulturkampf as a result of their participation in the Crusades is the fact that these Christians bring an unusual fervor and depth of commitment to their political opinions.47 For them, conservative political beliefs are a subset of conservative theological beliefs. Political values are derived from religious values. This is not always the case with liberals. It may somehow be the case with the religious left, but their political power is small compared with that of religious conservatives. The religious left is a largely gentrified and intellectual body, hard pressed to compete with the younger, more numerous and more grass-roots evangelicals typified by the Harvest Crusades. Moreover, the secular left, which is easily the dominant component of contemporary liberalism, is not energized with the religious themes that animate politically conservative evangelicals. These themes include a moral absolutism; a missionary impulse that aggressively seeks to persuade and convert others to one’s own worldview; and a visceral alarm at what is seen as the nation’s apocalyptic decline into social debauchery. Over the last two decades, sociologists of religion have documented the stunningly rapid growth of evangelical churches.48 Their literalistic

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belief systems, their emphasis on Bible study, and their individual service form and nurture a commitment to their local church. This religious commitment translates into strong political allegiance—again, usually rightward—because of the clear meaning and moral confidence evangelical faith provides in the midst of an increasingly ambiguous and unpredictable world.49 Thus, the political conservatives produced by the now nationwide Harvest Crusades are enthusiastically committed to at least the outlines of a culturally conservative ideology. In addition, their political influence is enhanced because their commonly held and clearly identified religious beliefs allow for a ready-made solidarity among themselves. And since the left has no vehicle equivalent to the Harvest Crusades for laying a religious foundation for its politics, the political impact of the Crusades is further magnified. They are a powerful conduit to conservative politics, without liberal peer. And so the Harvest Crusades—along with their organizationally unrelated counterpart, Promise Keepers—will continue to multiply and solidify conservative evangelical Christians. Moreover, the Crusades, as annual conventions, will have a cumulative effect on the political climate. Year after year, in city after city, they will lead thousands of people, particularly young people, into political conservatism generally. The full significance of this double harvest will begin to unfold in the first years of the new millennium. THE SELF-RIGHTEOUS POSTURE Without question, a primary trait of contemporary liberalism is its palpable self-righteousness. Liberals are quite convinced that they occupy the moral high ground on policy questions and that their response to social problems is notable for its compassion and sensitivity. Thus, as a matter of course they treat dissent from their views with contempt and disgust—and are almost never taken to task for doing so. Liberal debate by ad hominem is the usual procedure of American politics. Hence, it goes virtually unnoticed when Jesse Jackson declares the United States Supreme Court guilty of ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’—a form of mass murder—for its opposition to the practice of drawing congressional districts on the basis of race.50 Similarly, those who contest the fairness of racial and gender set-asides in college admissions are routinely and publicly labeled by the left as simple bigots.51 Further illustrating this liberal tendency is Bill Clinton, who, during his two presidential campaigns, consistently and without hesitation portrayed his opponents as heartless enemies of social security, Medicare, immigrants, women, minorities, gays, and basically anyone who was not a wealthy, straight white male. Indeed, Dick Morris, the president’s disgraced political adviser, recorded Bill Clinton as describing his opponent in the 1996 pres-

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idential election, gravely wounded World War II veteran and U.S. senator Bob Dole, as essentially an ‘‘evil, evil, man.’’52 Not surprisingly, this liberal self-anointing as morally superior has by now become internalized among American liberals, and so serves as an unexamined, unquestioned autonomous justification for their many statist programs.53 The one-dimensionality of the liberal political style is no cause for any sense of satisfaction from the right. Although the cogency of conservative ideas has forced liberal opponents to vindicate their own policies largely on the crude basis of self-righteousness and personal epithets, this tactic impairs the health of our social organism as a whole. As history makes clear, the vacuum created by the absence of genuine intellectual conflict is always filled by demagogues, propagandists, and those who place the best interests of the nation last. Thus, the vitality of our public life continues to decline, even while liberal politicians and advocates glibly assure us that their work is motivated by an unmatched compassion for people. And it is compassion that serves as perhaps the most powerful moral absolute in the political universe of contemporary liberalism and the foundation of its self-righteousness. But it is an unsystematized and mushy compassion, roughly equal to ‘‘be nice to people.’’ The concept of inappropriate compassion, or a compassion that is in tension with justice and personal accountability for behavior—and perhaps incommensurate with these values—is unknown to the modern liberal mind.54 The misunderstanding of compassion has led to many serious liberal dysfunctions, not the least of which is this tendency to eschew selfresponsibility and fail to hold people morally liable for their own actions. This pervasive tendency in American society to excuse people from individual accountability and find external ‘‘causes’’ of human moral failure—a habit fomented by liberalism’s infatuation with sociology—is well illustrated by a recent Los Angeles Times editorial. The article was written in the wake of a savage beating of an infant by a 6-year-old boy and his two 8-year-old partners who had broken into the house where the infant was asleep and beat the baby with a blunt object. The editorial wondered, ‘‘Why did this act of brutality happen? . . . what conditions produced the youngsters who hit and kicked the baby?’’55 The assumption that the childrens’ actions were exclusively or mainly the result of mysterious outside forces acting against the children’s otherwise benign wills is emblematic of the contemporary liberal mind. Although it is prudent to take stock of the assailants’ social situation, it is a fallacy to believe in the deterministic notion that their behavior was in some irresistible way ‘‘produced’’ by forces outside the children themselves. The emetic refrain of the criminal, ‘‘society made me do it,’’ has been a well-known personal manifestation of the liberal habit of looking to causes outside a person which might explain that person’s bad behavior.

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One such manifestation of this flight from self-responsibility is to be found in the musings of one convict, who wrote the Pittsburgh PostGazette to say: I am . . . awaiting to [be released], with nowhere to go, no money in my pocket. . . . I had asked to go to a halfway house, so that I would be able to make a couple of hundred dollars to be able to support myself until I could improve myself. But it was denied because . . . I owe money to the magistrate for fines which I was paying previous to coming to jail. For this they said, ‘‘No, you can’t help yourself by going to a halfway house.’’ When one of your readers falls victim to me—and one of them will fall victim, because of my need for survival—that person should understand it was nothing personal. I did what I did because I had to do what I was forced to do by the state system.56

This confused man’s rant illustrates what has been called the basic creed of liberalism, ‘‘poverty causes crime.’’57 Most often parroted by academics and elite journalists, this Marxist reduction of morality to economics is concisely described by Dennis Prager: The essential belief of contemporary liberalism—owing to the influence of traditional Leftist thought on liberals—is that economics is the primary determinant of human behavior, crime in particular. As the Clinton [1992] campaign theme put it, ‘‘It’s the economy, stupid!’’58

Not only does self-responsibility become largely anathema, but compassion also dictates that freedom itself becomes questionable, since freedom implies accountability, and holding people accountable is judgmental—which is uncompassionate and therefore forbidden in the liberal moral universe (unless conservative values are in the balance). Contemporary liberalism tends to describe human behavior, if it is negative, as nonvolitional. Hence, alcoholism, promiscuity, homosexuality, a bad temper, and other forms of traditionally disparaged behavior are often portrayed as nearly compulsory.59 Escaping such descriptions, however, is the simple fact that if my dysfunction is not a product of my liberty, then neither is my virtue. If I cannot be bad, then I cannot be good.60 The compassion imperative that is the essence of liberal selfrighteousness also leads to other gaps in social vision. For example, the need not to disapprove of out-of-wedlock births has led to casual attitudes toward illegitimacy, a practice that has proved utterly ruinous to society in general, and minority communities in particular.61 Similarly, the drive for egalitarianism in public schools means that gifted students are restrained and deterred from excellence, lest their distinguished performance injure the self-esteem of their classmates.62

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Furthermore, the societal refusal to firmly condemn the violent misbehavior of children and hold them personally responsible is generating a culture of violence among American youth. Contemporary American youth are capable of incredible brutality. For example, five San Francisco area teens were recently arrested for abducting a classmate after school one day, handcuffing him, beating him, making him eat leaves and coffee grounds, repeatedly shooting him in the chest with a bee-bee gun, and dripping hot candle wax all over his body.63 Today’s urban high school is nearly a war zone, with weapons and deep ethnic strife—induced by race-consciousness and group identification advocated by the left—a constant presence.64 The most rapidly growing segment of the American criminal population is children.65 As John J. DiIulio, Jr., has pointed out, there is a pervasive lack of belief among political leaders that criminals, especially child-criminals, are free moral agents, and therefore deserving of aggressive punishment for their crimes.66 Perhaps one of the least discussed but most troubling aspects of the perverse compassion of contemporary liberalism is the philosophy of child custody in which it has culminated. There is nearly an iron-clad presumption in favor of what Dennis Prager calls ‘‘blood over love,’’ with the courts regularly bestowing custody of children on parents who are patently unfit or undeserving. This, of course, is to the great detriment of children.67 But today’s liberalism, which, in the name of compassion, is so averse to standing in judgment of personal moral incompetence—except when practiced by conservative public figures— is unable to acknowledge this harmful effect. THE INTOLERANT POSTURE There is then a paradox: while contemporary liberalism is morally laissez faire in some respects, it is oppressively intolerant in others. Before considering instances of liberalism’s illiberalism, we should first contemplate the idea of tolerance itself.68 What does it mean to be tolerant? How should tolerance as a concept be understood? First, we might note that tolerance does not mean merely the uncritical and unreflective embrace of any and every idea or supposition. Tolerance is not indifference to competing and irreconcilable values, and it does not mandate moral neutrality, despite the ethos of contemporary liberalism which generally insists otherwise. Tolerance should not be understood as an absolute or acontextual concept; it is not to be extended to every person, in every circumstance, regardless of the particular situation. For example, an individual who, out of a strong desire to be tolerant and nonjudgmental, stands by and watches a heinous crime being committed—doing nothing to stop it, when he or she has the ability to do so—could hardly be praised for being tolerant of

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the beliefs/actions of another. In fact, we would normally assign moral culpability to such an individual, because we know that some actions, and by implication the attitudes from which they spring, ought not be countenanced in any way. We should be intolerant toward them. In much the same way, never to disagree with others, for the sake of ‘‘tolerance,’’ even when their statements are incoherent, dubious, or known to be untrue, could not really be said to be tolerance. In fact, true and genuine concern for others—and respect for their dignity as individual and autonomous agents of serious reflection—would seem to drive at prudently pointing out those instances in which they appear to have erred or are plainly in the wrong. Open debate and intellectual confrontation, when performed with respect and sensitivity, is not a sign of intolerance or bigotry. Rather, it constitutes an overt recognition of the individuality and moral agency of the person with whom one is dialoguing. ‘‘Tolerance’’ is best understood by realizing that its exercise does not presuppose or require the acceptance or agreement of the notion toward which I am being tolerant. In fact, in tolerating an idea x, there is a plain sense in which I am not approving of x. Tolerance, in one sense, involves the abiding of something toward which one has a negative estimation, perhaps strongly so. It is the honest and forthright engagement of an idea or set of ideas with which I disagree. After all, it does not make sense to ‘‘tolerate’’ an idea that one actually agrees with, or in some meaningful way believes to be deeply right. If a person thoroughly agrees with the concept of racial equality under law, it is nonsense for that person to speak of ‘‘tolerating’’ racial fairness. It seems appropriate, then, to conclude that the concept of tolerance has an element of disapproval or disagreement inherent in its application. Its relevance presupposes the presence of discordant viewpoints. Thus, the modern liberal habit of ascribing ‘‘intolerance’’ to conservative critiques of abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, and so on, is incoherent, since tolerance as a value is relevant only in the context of disagreement. Maurice Cranston, in his definition of tolerance, has recognized this point, writing ‘‘Toleration is a policy of patient forbearance in the presence of something which is disliked or disapproved of.’’69 Tolerance, rightly understood, is essentially a conceptual device—prescribing a certain mode of thought and action—that makes it possible for persons of diverse opinions to cognitively interact within a bond of civility. The incivility of contemporary liberalism is revealed in part by the rapidity with which its adherents ascribe ‘‘intolerance’’ to those who dissent from its program. So in a social context, being tolerant of another’s beliefs means that one accepts the presence of the belief and recognizes its holder’s right to it, while at the same time rejecting—not necessarily out of arrogance or

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meanness—the content of that belief. So one can tolerate a belief and still hold it to be misdirected or in some sense false. In addition, one need not be unsure of one’s own beliefs in order to be tolerant of divergent ones. A clear and important distinction can be made between accepting and acknowledging that someone can hold a certain belief, and accepting and embracing the substance of, and warrant for, that belief. Genuine and reasonable tolerance requires the former but not the latter. If it did, then to be genuinely tolerant would mean accepting as ‘‘true’’ or accurate every value held by any person at any time. Besides straining credulity, this constitutes an infringement of the cognitive freedom of those who might choose not to hold a given belief(s), or choose to believe in the falsity of another’s beliefs. Now, of course, a theory of truth could be advanced which perhaps made possible such an approach. For example, ‘‘a belief is true if someone holds it, or wants it to be true,’’ but such constructions edge toward the most extravagant and implausible relativisms as not to warrant serious consideration. So tolerance, as a practice, is rightly applied to people, not ideas. Failure to fully recognize this principle is at the heart of modern liberalism’s overreaching notion of tolerance.70 There is nothing necessarily immoral about rejecting an idea, even if it is the most important idea to its holder. Rejecting an idea is simply a formal cognitive-volitional act. The moral quality of embracing or rejecting an idea is determined by the substance of the idea under consideration. It is immoral to reject a prohibition on rape. It is morally good to embrace an acceptance of the equality of all persons under the law without regard to their skin color. Rejecting an idea or belief, even if it is sincerely held by another person and even if it is of great import to them and their community, is not necessarily an immoral act. However, if I were to harass them, beat them, or imprison them personally because I disagree with their position, that would be intolerant and immoral. But if I respectfully disagree with my gay friend over the moral nature of his sexual practice, I have not committed an intolerant and bigoted act. Human persons, as dignified, autonomous agents of reflection and deliberation, are the proper objects of tolerance. In contrast, ideas, of whatever sort, are not to be tolerated; they are to be evaluated and examined with an eye toward their sensibility, moral justification, and social consequences, ever mindful of what they may mean to the individual embracing them. But in American life today deviant behavior, and not merely deviant thought, is granted a vast range of tolerance. The moral shield that makes this possible is one of the cardinal moral absolutes of contemporary liberalism, self-expression. Few could gainsay the ascendance of the concept of self-expression in American public life.71 Today doing your own thing and ‘‘expressing yourself’’ serve as unquestioned justifications for all

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manner of behavior. Any activity that is asserted to be the manifestation of some deeper conviction, whatever that may be, is blessed with the patina of moral legitimacy. The absolutizing of freedom in contemporary American life and the prima facie rightness accorded actions performed by individual ‘‘choice’’ insulate the work of self-expression from moral criticisms of even the simplest sort.72 Apart from the stultification of public discourse which this solipsism leads to, it overlooks the plain fact that self-expression is not an intrinsic value; there is nothing inherently good about it. Stalin and Hitler, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer’s exhibitions of their values and worldviews were wholly evil, devoid of any redemptive features. The virtue of one’s self-expression is directly related to the complex of character, values, purposes, and relationships which together substantially determine who one is. To simply display, through some chosen action, what one has become does not equal a morally valuable practice. The formality of self-expression requires some antecedent personal virtue to merit ethical approbation. Our popular and intellectual cultures greatly err by uncritically embracing all self-expression as ‘‘healthy’’ and appropriate, without regard to its content. Indeed, the entire edifice of contemporary psychotherapy and psychological analysis is predicated, in part, on the conclusion that some forms of behavior are pathological, indicative of inner turmoil and dysfunction, and in need of remedial therapy. It is the moral absolute of self-expression, in conjunction with the selfbestowed moral superiority of contemporary liberalism and its inveterate antitraditionalism that produce its intolerant thrust, a force directed primarily at conservative politics, dissenters from liberal orthodoxy, and heterosexual white men. Consider the following short menu of intolerant remarks and deeds sanctioned by modern liberal policies, values, or attitudes. • A nationally prominent liberal economist and social commentator attending a conference on race and ethnic relations in higher education openly proclaimed, ‘‘I want equality of outcomes [for women and minorities], not equal opportunity,’’ and then she deemed the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which over fifty people were murdered, ‘‘a long overdue insurrection.’’73 • In November of 1996 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a bill—the first of its kind in the nation—requiring all organizations that do business with the city to offer full benefits to domestic partners, whatever their sex. Those who fail to comply will not be allowed to do business with the city. This includes Catholic Charities, which operates an array of services for the city’s poor and needy. Archbishop of San Francisco William Levada remarked that the bill is an effort ‘‘to force a church to adopt a policy on the basis of activity which is contrary to its moral code.’’74

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• Ron Greer, pastor, firefighter, and black community activist in notoriously liberal Madison, Wisconsin, was recently suspended from the fire department without pay for two months and ordered to undergo diversity training because he passed out a religious tract at work which denounced homosexuality as unbiblical. His home has been the target of gay and lesbian protestors, who have placed small pink signs all around his yard reading ‘‘dyke power,’’ ‘‘queer and proud,’’ and ‘‘queers against Greer.’’ And his church was blockaded by the gay protestors, who prevented parishioners from entering, and then, upon the commencement of services, the protestors, now inside the church, shouted continuously, their jeers overpowering anyone who tried to speak from the pulpit. While all this was taking place, more protestors chanted ‘‘Bring back the lions! Bring back the lions!’’75 • In late 1996 Jewish ethicist Dennis Prager published an essay in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles asserting that publicly practicing gays or lesbians should not be rabbis because of the special and privileged nature of their office. He was then pilloried by another rabbi as ‘‘going beyond his usual diatribe against homosexuality’’ and ‘‘feed[ing] a climate of hate and exclusion.’’ Prager’s belief about the special nature of the rabbinate was also labeled as ‘‘arrogant’’ and ‘‘inappropriate.’’ Prager later wrote of the incident. His words merit quotation, for they accurately portray the intolerance of today’s liberalism: In the 1950s, America suffered through a period known as McCarthyism. Its distinguishing characteristic was the leveling of charges of ‘‘Communist’’ and other terrible labels on a person solely because his views differed from those of the Right wing senator, Joseph McCarthy, and his supporters. Opponents were not debated, they were labeled. For the last 20 years, there has been a resurgence of such tactics, this time from the Left. Rather than dialogue with those who differ, many of the Left simply label their opponents ‘‘racist,’’ ‘‘sexist,’’ ‘‘homophobic,’’ ‘‘mean-spirited,’’ ‘‘intolerant’’ etc.76 • Intolerant liberalism will go as far as to deny the reality of biology as when Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who has three children and is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was said by a liberal feminist critic to be ‘‘without a uterus,’’ and was reviled by another feminist as ‘‘not someone I want to represent feminine accomplishment.’’ Another woman, Carla Hills, active in the Ford and Reagan presidential administrations—and therefore insufficiently liberal—was described by a prominent feminist as ‘‘not a woman.’’77 • At Brown University during the Gulf War, some patriotic students decided to hang a United States flag from their dorm room window. University officials told the students to remove the flag, for its presence might offend other students who, for whatever reason, disapproved of the war.78 • In 1984 San Francisco State University approved two new academic positions in its English Department, but with the proviso that candidates recommended

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for the positions must be of any skin color except white. The provost of the university emphasized, ‘‘Let me underscore that [this] stipulation is an absolute condition.’’79 • Former Democratic Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania was forbidden from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because his prolife position is at odds with the official position of the party. Later, when The Village Voice invited him to speak on the possibility of being a pro-life liberal, he was shouted down by audience members who disagreed with his views.80 • In a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan, feminist Simone de Beauvoir openly stated the foundational principle of feminism regarding women and work: ‘‘No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.’’81 • In 1992 protestors at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst stole 10,000 copies of the student newspaper The Daily Collegian, because the paper didn’t publish an editorial about the first Rodney King trial. In 1993 at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of African-American students destroyed 14,000 copies of the student newspaper because they disagreed with its coverage of blacks. The university administration at Penn did not discipline the students.82

Similar examples could be multiplied many times over. Contemporary liberalism, separated from its classical origins by its alienation from bourgeois values and its animus against the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, has been transmogrified into a neo-Marxist leftism, with minorities, women, homosexuals, and the poor as the new proletariat and the Great White Male/Christian Oppressor as the capitalist who exploits their suffering. Indeed, as we remarked at the beginning of this book, the conservatives of today largely bear the mantle of classical liberalism, and those who are today called liberals are better classified as statists and socialists operating beneath the cloak of rights-talk. Liberalism has become pungently illiberal, and most types of conservatism have become reformist vis-a`-vis prevailing cultural tides. The current situation bears out the maxim that liberals always fare better under a conservative regime than do conservatives in a dominantly liberal political milieu. The imperative for change and the ideological aggressiveness resident in contemporary liberalism does not hesitate to enlist the power of the state, litigation, or public invective to achieve its ends, and this invariably leads to a coercive effect on conservatives who, by ideological orientation, are directed more toward their families, vocations, and personal relationships rather than politics and social transformation. Surely this must change if the devolution of American life is to abate.83 For as Richard John Neuhaus has frankly warned, citizens of goodwill must not underestimate the force of ‘‘the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of [today’s] liberalism.’’84

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RACE It is in the hypercontentious areas of race and abortion that the dysfunctions of contemporary liberalism are perhaps most clearly apparent. Yet, because of the force of political correctness—sired by contemporary liberalism—which superintends discussions of these topics, it is seldom the case that open, honest, common-sense-based commentary is presented. The basic reality that supports this phenomenon is ‘‘preference falsification.’’85 This phrase, coined by economist Timur Kuran, refers to the mobilization of social pressure to incline people to publicly praise ideas as true which they privately believe to be false. So in public, out of fear of being labeled ‘‘racist’’ or ‘‘insensitive,’’ people may accept the reasonableness of affirmative action, but in private they deem it a program for reverse racial discrimination. Similarly, in private, blacks and nonblacks may criticize black politicians whom they think exaggerate about the power and prevalence of racism in America, but in public they are silent, since they do not want to be called an ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ or a ‘‘racist.’’ The same idea holds true for the rapidly growing number and scope of corporate diversity programs, except that here the pressure to be approving is magnified, because people’s promotions and jobs may well be jeopardized if they are too forthright in their disagreement.86 Our task then is to frankly reflect on the American dysfunction of racial politics and specifically present six lamentable phenomena that characterize the current racial discourse, and that substantially stem from social forces and ideas generated and enforced by modern liberalism. Anger Many African Americans today feel a great deal of anger: anger at white people, anger at Jewish people, anger at black conservatives, and anger at America.87 Usually in public settings the press, politicians, and commentators pay obeisance to this anger. It is rare to find it challenged. But I would like to suggest that the widespread anger in some black communities is selfdestructive and socially harmful. To get an understanding of the depths and intensity of this anger, consider these realities: • Emphatic cheers erupted at a filled-to-capacity Madison Square Garden, during a rally held by the Nation of Islam, when a speaker merely mentioned the name of Colin Ferguson—the Long Island commuter train gunman who murdered several people out of anger at whites and ‘‘Uncle Tom Negroes.’’ A National Law Journal survey showed that 68 percent of African Americans believed that white racism caused Ferguson to kill.88 A black professor at New York University called Ferguson a ‘‘hero’’ and

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• Raptivist Sister Souljah described American society as a ‘‘race war’’ and suggested that ‘‘if black people kill black people everyday, why not have a week and kill white people?’’ Jesse Jackson called her critics divisive, and said that Bill Clinton’s criticism of Souljah was indicative of a character flaw in Clinton.90 • Upon O. J. Simpson’s acquittal in his criminal trial, students at a Howard University auditorium, who had gathered to watch the verdict, cheered ecstatically. • A celebrated black author called the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which more than fifty people were murdered, ‘‘a display of justified social rage.’’91 Black economist Julianne Malveaux declared, ‘‘Racism is as American as the Constitution’’ and attributed the L.A. riots to ineffective affirmative action programs and declining urban aid.92 • In Brooklyn in 1991, after an elderly Hassidic Jewish man killed a black child in an auto accident, black residents took to the streets yelling, ‘‘Heil Hitler!’’ and ‘‘Zionazi!’’ When they came upon Australian rabbinic student Yankel Rosenbaum, someone in the mob yelled, ‘‘Get the Jew!’’ Rosenbaum was stabbed to death. One Lemrick Nelson was charged with the crime, but was acquitted by a predominantly black jury, even though police found him near the scene with a bloody knife in his possession, the blood on the knife was verified by DNA analysis to be Rosenbaum’s, Nelson was identified by the dying Rosenbaum as his attacker, and Nelson confessed to the murder. After the verdict, the jury partied with Nelson’s attorney. As Eric Breindel wrote of the events, ‘‘For Hassidic Jews New York City today is a lot like the Jim Crow south was for blacks themselves 30 years ago. Justice is all but unattainable.’’93 • ‘‘Ice Cube,’’ a millionaire rapper, has said: ‘‘The American Dream is not for Blacks. Blacks who [still believe in that dream] are kidding themselves. There’s only room in that dream for a few Blacks.’’94 • Black anger often manifests itself in racial hyperbole and exaggeration. When in the spring of 1997 the Los Angeles Police Commission exercised its legal prerogative—as per the Christopher Commission for police reforms—not to recommend rehiring black police chief Willie Williams for another five year term, Los Angeles city councilman Nate Holden, who is also black, termed the police commission a ‘‘kangaroo court [which] lynched Police Chief Willie Williams.’’95 • Professional football player Reggie White, speaking to a group of mostly black high school students in Knoxville, Tennessee, said that police intentionally provoke young black men in order to have an excuse to arrest them. He further explained to the black teens, ‘‘Why do you think they’re talking about building more prisons instead of creating opportunities for you? Because they want you in jail. They want you to be ignorant.’’96 • Despite emphatic efforts at racial fairness and more than widespread

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public dialogue about race, not to mention a very high-profile civil rights movement and academic enthusiasm for African-American studies and writing, black Americans are overwhelmingly pessimistic about racial progress.97 • Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney denounced the Supreme Court decision forbidding racially gerrymandered congressional districts as racist, and white voters as race-based. Her newly drawn district was a majority white district; yet, when these voters returned her to Congress in the 1996 election, she complained that her victory would be used by opponents of affirmative action to assert that whites are not racist.98 • Writer Ellis Cose says middle-class blacks have ‘‘deeply repressed rage,’’ and are as pessimistic about this country and their life chances as the seriously poor.99

And on and on. Many black Americans are convinced that most white Americans are racists, that American society is institutionally racist, and that black socioeconomic success is rendered impossible by these realities. White reporters, white liberal politicians, and white liberal commentators and academics obediently affirm these sentiments, terrorized by the threat of being called ‘‘racist.’’ Contemporary liberalism, in its aversion to self-responsibility, in its proclivity to posit structural explanations for individual behavior, and in its misapplication of compassion, has produced a moral double standard in this country: one for black Americans, one for nonblack Americans. As Dennis Prager has insightfully remarked: [T]he laborious, unromantic, un-‘‘revolutionary’’ work of developing character, personal ethical values, is the most important of any society, including and especially black society in America today. The only reason I say ‘‘especially’’ is that it is the community least expected to live by moral norms. That’s because liberals, black and white, make exceptions for black behavior that they would never make for whites.100

Black Americans, of course, are the ones most injured by this double standard, as it unavoidably diverts their attention from the cultivation of the personal responsibility and individual capital that make for social and economic success and mobility. Contemporary liberalism has created a cultural context that has nurtured black anger at America and resentment of whites, and this has produced a pronounced separatism in much of black life, as well as an inclination to withdraw from the American social and economic mainstream. This only entrenches poverty and further resentment on the part of blacks. As Clarence Thomas explained to a group of graduating black collegians:

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You all have a much tougher road [than I did]. You now have a popular national rhetoric which says that you can’t learn because of racism, you can’t get up in the mornings because of racism. Unlike me, you must not only overcome the repressiveness of racism, you must also overcome the lure of excuses. You have twice the job I had.101

Pervasive black anger has had many other effects as well. Fundamentally, it is the source of blacks’ prevalent belief that most whites are racists. Uncritical acceptance of this idea has led to an irrational conspiracy mongering, seen in the conviction of 29 percent of New York City blacks that AIDS (that is, HIV) was, or possibly was, deliberately created in a laboratory for the purpose of infecting black people.102 This paranoia, and the black anger that fuels it—contrary to the blamesociety-for-social problems official story of contemporary liberalism—is the product of racialist hype and race-baiting practiced by the civil rights establishment. Liberal black politicians (as well as white liberals), selfappointed racial spokesmen, and liberals (black and white) in media work routinely stoke the fires of black anger and racial hostility by constantly and mechanically proclaiming their script of ‘‘racism in America,’’ and recklessly portraying American society as inveterately opposed to black success. Despite this quasireligious commitment to racism, scholarly studies show that an overwhelming majority of white Americans now reject racism as evil and that the racial attitudes of whites have changed for the better over the last thirty-five years. For example, social researchers Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza report in their book The Scar of Race that today blacks are actually more likely than whites to hold negative stereotypes about blacks.103 The rhetoric of rage that bathes black communities has myriad other harmful consequences as well. The rise in the practice of jury nullification is one of the more disturbing. Inner-city juries, largely black, have increasingly been freeing black defendants—even obviously guilty ones— out of a desire to avoid putting any more black men in prison. Of course, this means that many guilty men have gone free, only to further terrorize black communities, causing immeasurable harm and grief.104 Furthermore, the anger fomented in black communities by professional race men has engendered and now sustains the powerful cult of raceconsciousness and group identification. Here the full humanity of the person is wrapped in the suffocating embrace of self-definition by race and ethnicity. The belief that assimilation into mainstream American life is pointless leaves no alternative but black separatism and hyper-race consciousness. One obvious consequence of the liberal practice of group identification today is the formation of what Shelby Steele has called ‘‘grievance groups,’’ organizations that pursue their own social and political agenda

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by trumpeting their victimization.105 This politics hurts everybody—it makes African Americans more angry, it discourages black youth about their life-chances, and it alienates nonblacks from interracial cooperation. The only people it benefits are those who make their living in the race industry. The greater racial hostilities in this country are, the easier it is for them to peddle inflammatory nostrums about ‘‘oppression,’’ ‘‘persecution,’’ and residual bigotry.106 Few practices in American public life today are more widespread than race-consciousness. While once white racism was its primary manifestation, today it is found mainly in the identity politics of contemporary liberalism. The inclination to define one’s self based on one’s ethnicity is of such far-reaching cultural force that it has even reached into psychiatry. For example, San Francisco General Hospital’s psychiatric treatment program begins with the assignment of a patient to a treatment unit or ‘‘team’’ based on their ethnicity—blacks go to the black unit, Hispanics to the Hispanic treatment unit, and so on, regardless of their specific psychological problems.107 The influence of racial rage and the separatism it engenders are strong enough to generate public policy innovations that are sometimes of questionable worth. The row over Ebonics (Ebony⫹Phonics) in late 1996 and 1997 is one such instance. As with so many innovations spawned by the values of contemporary liberalism—in this case, race-consciousness and ethnic pride—Ebonics will ultimately end up hurting many black youth, not least by creating a wage gap for black workers.108 Even Eldridge Cleaver, the former black panther who described himself in the Los Angeles Times as ‘‘one of the most liberal people in the world,’’ vehemently protested the drive to teach Ebonics.109 One of the more tragic manifestations of the corrosive effect of group anger and the race consciousness it leads to has been the degeneration of civility on public school campuses, which, in urban America, are almost always multiracial. The emphasis on race and ethnicity has been tremendously divisive on public college and high school campuses.110 It requires of minority youth racial fidelity; that is, they must adopt the practices of their ethnic group or face ostracism and calumny. As many black youngsters understand it, racial loyalty obliges them to actively oppose those of their race who ‘‘sell out,’’ that is, enter into behavioral cooperation with the school system, the institutional embodiment of mainstream, Caucasian America, usually referred to as ‘‘them.’’ This amounts to, a pervasive and destructive ethic of anti-achievement. This horrible phenomenon is chronicled in an important study by John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham, focusing on the attitudes of students at a predominantly black high school in Washington, D.C.111 For our purposes, the primary import of the Ogbu and Fordham study is that some black schools perversely equate academic achievement with ‘‘acting white.’’

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This social fiction has a tragically debilitating effect on the black community as a whole by establishing the falsehood that academic excellence is inappropriate for black students. An instance of this anti-achievement code is found in the chilling experience of 14-year-old Za’kettha Blaylock. A top student in her Oakland middle school, she was regularly harassed by anonymous telephone threats assuring the bright girl, ‘‘We’re gonna kill you.’’ The threats were the work of a gang of black girls at her school who felt obliged to intimidate black students who achieved academic excellence. ‘‘They think that just because you’re smart, they can go around beating you up,’’ Za’kettha explained. By virtue of her good grades, she became the target of the most potent weapon in her antagonists’ verbal arsenal: she tried to ‘‘act white.’’112 The consequences of such thought patterns are very real. Recently in Washington, D.C., several black students who graduated from high school were presented with academic excellence awards, but were fearful of coming up and receiving them at graduation because they didn’t want to be accused by their black peers of ‘‘acting white.’’113 Racial anger also shapes American journalism. The news media, particularly the more elite venues, are notoriously beholden to racial power brokers who have the power to call a press conference and denounce, as racist, reporters and publications whom they feel have not been sufficiently sensitive. Such charges can be very embarrassing, intimidating, and commercially damaging. Hence, for example, the media were quick to emphasize reports that Texaco executives had used racial epithets against black employees. In fact, that charge proved questionable.114 Similarly, in the spring and summer of 1996 a rash of burnings of black churches was immediately attributed to racial hostility and as proof that old Jim Crow was alive and well. But a review of six years of federal, state, and local data by the Associated Press found that arsons have increased at all churches, black and white, and that no explicit, systematically racist motivation is apparent.115 Michael Fumento argued that the notion that racist burnings of black churches had surged was simply a myth.116 The much-reported burning of black churches in 1996 was eventually widely discredited as uncritical and irresponsible journalism.117 Apparently, the liberal journalistic view of racial problems unquestioningly accepts news of discrimination, as it did recently with racebased bank lending. For example, one study by Alicia Munnell of the Federal Reserve of Boston—widely reported in newspapers and television as conclusive proof of racist lending practices—was shown to be seriously flawed by economist Walter Williams. Loan applications by blacks that had purportedly been rejected on racial grounds were found to have been rejected for demonstrably legitimate reasons.118 But of all the social manifestations of black anger, the most ferocious

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is that directed at black dissidents, usually black conservatives. The epithets, the contempt, and the derisive attacks are unceasing and well beyond the pale of civil dissent. Clarence Thomas, nearly a decade after his ascent to the United States Supreme Court, is still the regular target of verbal attacks and actual physical protests. Joseph Lowry, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Thomas was ‘‘[B]ecoming to the black community what Benedict Arnold was to the nation he deserted; and what Judas Iscariot was to Jesus: a traitor, and what Brutus was to Caesar: an assassin!’’119 Similarly, Democratic congressman Bill May stated that Justice Thomas and other black conservatives were part of a ‘‘new Negro cabal,’’ which is ‘‘contemptible, ignoble.’’ He went on to explain, in a model of liberal tolerance, that the ‘‘goal of this group of Negro wanderers is to maim and kill other blacks for the gratification and entertainment of—for lack of a more accurately descriptive word—ultraconservative white racists.’’120 The civil rights establishment has on numerous occasions protested the speaking engagements of Justice Thomas, and has vigorously attempted to prevent the obviously dangerous perception that the Supreme Court judge from Pinpoint, Georgia, is a valuable role model for black children.121 Of course, rap stars, with their violent and promiscuous lyrics (and sometimes personal lives), are virtually never publicly rejected by black leaders as unfit role models for black youth. The existential predicament of the black conservative or black dissident in America is a profound one. On the one hand, when he expresses his sincerely held views, other black people often accuse him of being a ‘‘race betrayer,’’ a racial sellout, or an ‘‘Uncle Tom.’’ On the other hand, some white conservatives, in their enthusiastic agreement with him, misconstrue the import of his message and manifest a certain passivity and indifference to interracial cooperation, thus inadvertently lending a measure of credence to the claim that the black conservative critique can have an isolating effect on black America. But, importantly, this effect is not due to the nature of the black conservative critique; rather, it is caused by the inappropriate response to it of some white conservatives. As an illustration of the unfairness of many intraracial verbal assaults on black dissenters, we might consider the case of Los Angeles radio talkshow host and social commentator Larry Elder.122 A local group of black liberals calling themselves ‘‘The Talking Drum Community Forum’’ labeled the charismatic and articulate Elder an outright threat to the welfare of the black community. They claimed that his failure to ideologically conform to the dominant politics of Los Angeles African Americans constituted a frontal assault on black dignity and civil rights victories. The drive to gag Elder was loosely organized and shadowy. Its centerpiece was pressure on advertisers to withdraw their commercials from

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KABC, the radio station on which Elder appeared and still does as of this writing. The silencing effort produced and disseminated a flier around south-central Los Angeles shopping centers calling for Elder’s ouster. The tract was unsigned, containing only a phone number at the bottom, which ominously promises ‘‘more information.’’ The flier itself is akin to an intraracial hate-piece, containing outright fabrications such as ‘‘Larry Elder believes: blacks are lazy; blacks are unintelligent; blacks are uneducated; blacks are immoral; blacks are the cause of crime in America.’’ There were no citations, no dates when Elder allegedly said these things, only bald assertions, which Elder vehemently denied on the air. This movement constituted one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment that Los Angeles had seen in a long time. But because the censurers in this case were politically influential black liberals—who ironically exalt diversity as a social value and lay claim to the mantle of the civil rights movement—their activities went carefully unnoticed. Suddenly, it seemed, the media-sentinels of free speech could not be found. Why? Because they feared being branded as ‘‘racists’’ if they defended Elder’s right to speak his mind. The threat of the race card protected the cowardly and dishonest campaign against Elder from public criticism. One can imagine the media outcry if white conservatives deliberately— and with deceit—tried to force a white liberal off the air. It would become yet another demonstration of the ‘‘mean spirited’’ and ‘‘intolerant’’ nature of the ‘‘radical right.’’ The unprincipled attack on Elder exposes one of the troubling paradoxes of contemporary American public life. Socially renegade black Americans are still targets for lynching, but today, instead of being chased by a hateful white mob with a rope, they are pursued by an angry black thought police armed with the misappropriated legacy of the civil rights movement. As Robert Woodson said,‘‘The civil rights leadership has very successfully imposed a gag rule on the black community: unless you espouse the liberal Democratic ideology, you’re out of step, and we’ll accuse you of being anything but a child of God. People have been intimidated by that.’’123 Black community activist Jesse Peterson, whose group BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny) strives to inculcate principles of responsible masculinity within young black men, concurs with Woodson, saying: Through their constant anger at America and hatred of dissent from their positions by other black people, mainstream black leadership has shackled our community. Our neighborhoods will never change for the better until we encourage free thinking, and until we teach our children that anger and resentment at white people is self-destructive, and that black youth cripple

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themselves by looking anywhere but within themselves for the ability to succeed.124

Color-Coordinated Thinking The often unspoken supposition that controls much commentary about contemporary racial politics is that only one ideology—contemporary liberalism—is in the best interests of black Americans, and therefore all black people who care about black progress must hold liberal social and political views. Great pressure is exerted on black intellectuals to conform to the liberal political paradigm. For example, Jesse Jackson, the archetypal black ‘‘spokesman’’ and an unalloyed liberal, was once a passionate pro-life dissenter from the pervasive abortion culture. He once asked, ‘‘What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the abortion of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person, and what kind of a society, will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?’’125 Of course, these views are no more, because the Democratic party, wherein lie his ambitions, does not brook such sentiments. So, in the grip of intellectually stifling contemporary liberalism and the color-coded thinking it breeds, black children who violate the behavioral expectations of their black peers in ways perceived as more befitting whites will be pilloried as ‘‘acting white,’’ and black adults who hold conservative or libertarian political opinions will be reviled as ‘‘sellouts,’’ or self-loathing ‘‘Uncle Toms.’’126 Of course, the cognitive virus of color-coordinated thinking is not unique to black America. It has infected other communities as well. It is common today to hear the women’s rights establishment celebrate the triumphs of the ‘‘year of the [liberal] woman,’’ and a host of other interest groups regularly weigh in with three cheers for ‘‘their kind,’’ as though their character and self-constitution were dictated by the color of their skin or their gender. But what is going unnoticed in this frenzy of gender and ethnic cheerleading is the profoundly antidemocratic nature of this political style. It is a great fallacy that someone who looks like you, or shares your gender, is going to represent you adequately as a legislator. This is because, obviously, not all women think alike, nor do all Hispanics, Asian Americans, or African Americans. People are autonomous individuals, and must be so understood. They have different perspectives and opinions, views that are not necessarily related to complexion or sex. Fortunately, values and opinions are much more than skin deep. To believe otherwise—as contemporary liberalism does—is to subscribe to a biological determinism that is shockingly dehumanizing and illiberal. The great paradox here is that the special interest groups that advocate

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color and gender-coordinated thinking—in their unending campaign for political power and influence—actually end up dehumanizing their members and reducing each of them to a component of the oppressed class, rather than as an individual, free-thinking human being, with all the complexities that implies. Ironically, it is liberal Democrats, the main practitioners of this constricting counterfeit of democracy, who have always featured themselves as ‘‘tolerant’’ and ‘‘open-minded.’’ But by their embrace of collectivist politics and color-coordinated thinking, Democratic political leaders have strictly defined which ideas can be accepted as ‘‘fair’’ and legitimate for any ethnicity or gender. If a woman or a minority wavers from the prescribed orthodoxy for people who look like them, they are seen as political freaks, apostates from liberal group solidarity. Frequently, they are accused of selling out to the System or the Patriarchy. But the reality is that the individuality of each person enables them to cognitively transcend the prescriptions of color-coordinated thinking, and makes possible the common moral project of pluralist democracy. A denial of this transcendence is an invitation to racial balkanization that transforms America into various enclaves of ‘‘victims,’’ and works to move the country away from vital political debate and rational policymaking. Such a trend undermines excellence by emphasizing race and gender above skills and merit. In short, it is a withdrawal from rigorous analysis of policies and their consequences into a color- and gendercoordinated world, where people who look alike are expected to think alike. Thus, at California State University in Northridge, in suburban Los Angeles, the leader of the black student union was opposed to the presence of someone nonblack teaching in the Pan-African Studies Department. That the offending individual was teaching remedial English didn’t matter. In the eyes of the black student union, her failure to be black disqualified her from teaching in that department. This row at Cal State Northridge over a Caucasian teaching in the PanAfrican Studies Department is but one example of the color-coordinated thinking that has overrun common sense in American public life. There are black minds and white minds, this confused reasoning goes, and the two can never meet. This fatuous intellectual segregation has served the interests of black studies departments all over the country, for it has effectively installed them as the official arbiters of ‘‘The Black Consciousness’’ and ‘‘The Black Experience.’’ As the racial follies at Northridge so plainly showed, it has intellectually impoverished our universities and the young people in them. Any morally responsible person who would comment on this situation must first say the obvious, something that the custodians of political correctness everywhere will try to hush: the black student union acted in a racist and thoughtless manner. Imagine if a

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group of white students were trying to prevent a black professor from teaching a course in European history, simply because the professor was black. It would become a racial cause ce´le`bre, indicative of America’s racial pathology. At Northridge, the putative reason for banning the white woman from teaching English in that department was that she lacked the requisite ‘‘cultural experience.’’ But that amorphous suggestion is simply a politically correct synonym for ethnic chauvinism. Individual experience is not racially uniform, with all blacks having one set of experiences and all whites another. Our common experience as human beings far surpasses the barriers of racial difference. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew this, and thus insisted that all people be judged on the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. In so doing, he presupposed our ability to understand and evaluate the social situation and morality of everyone, however different they are from us in race, class, or gender. Indeed, the very logic of the original civil rights movement was that nonblacks could understand the plight of discrimination and repression facing blacks, and move to provide appropriate redress. It assumed that ethnic background could not restrain the strength of human insight and moral principle. We can learn and teach about people who are racially different from ourselves. That, of course, is the basic thesis of multiculturalism, a pedagogy that is extremely influential in American education today. But the logic of the black students at Northridge denies this. They forgot that through the years black scholars have abundantly shown that ethnicity is inconsequential in learning and teaching. There are black scholars abounding in all manner of disciplines: Stephen Carter in law, Orlando Patterson in sociology, Glenn Loury in economics, Ben Carson and Keith Black in medicine, Condoleeza Rice in international relations, and on and on. Are these all African disciplines? No, and neither are they essentially European. Like all bodies of knowledge, they are comprised of various concepts, hypotheses, and assertions all dialectically related, all open to universal human reflection and analysis. As W.E.B. Du Bois movingly wrote of his love of knowledge, and classical study, I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius, and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.’’127

We do not think with our skin. The very foundation of higher education in this country is the proposition that the world of ideas is wide open to everyone, regardless of background. The only requirement for entering into learning is an open mind and a desire to understand. Ethnicity is unimportant. To claim otherwise is incredibly dehumanizing,

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intellectually stifling, and an affront to human creativity and initiative. How tragically ironic that today, more than forty years after the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education which desegregated American schools, it is a black student union that seeks to bar someone from a classroom because of her race. Such is the myopia of the groupthink engendered by the politics of contemporary liberalism. Public Truth It is a fact of our national life that a rigid protocol guides social and political discussion. Some topics are generally left untouched, since to broach them is to court social death. For example, the hellfire of ad hominems that met the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray with the publication of their book The Bell Curve was profound and certainly limited public analysis of their arguments.128 The substance of those arguments, however suspect they may or may not have been, warranted debate, as do all research projects. But the rules of sociopolitical analysis did not permit it. Whenever these guidelines of discussion become entrenched, they cast the dye of a ‘‘public truth,’’ an idea beyond discussion, a taken-for-granted reality that excites passions and sentiments so intense as to make widespread, open reflection on it practically impossible. Public Truth is established and protected by the ‘‘spiral of silence,’’ or social silence, the palpable social pressure that everyone senses and that squelches conversation of sacrosanct or uncomfortable topics.129 The creation of Public Truth follows two main avenues, commission and omission. When someone declares that all calls for welfare reform and a reduction in out-of-wedlock births are cynical ‘‘race-baiting,’’ he adds a pillar—a dubious one—to the edifice of Public Truth.130 Here, Public Truth is shaped by commission—by direct allegation about social reality. This method was practiced in a more incendiary form by the Reverend Cecil Murray, who effectively plied the contemporary liberal art of absolving criminals from responsibility for their crimes by asserting society made them do it: No one goes around burning who has a job, who’s been allowed to have his family. . . . If the book is written on what starts fires, it’s unemployed people who are in a depressed area, who have to take a gang as a surrogate family, whose great grandmother has been raped, who’s not been allowed to have his own culture or history, who has been told that God is white. That’s who starts fires. When you write the book, that’s what you’re gonna write.131

The truth of Public Truth is a functional truth, not an actual, empirical truth. In other words, the contentions that are given the imprimatur of

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Public Truth control public discourse and condition public policy as though they actually had a sound basis in social fact and human experience—even though they are not so grounded. They are instead the constructions of opinion-makers and knowledge class cognoscente who, with the arrogance historically characteristic of the political left, conveniently believe themselves to be exclusively endowed with the insight, vision, and public benevolence that qualifies them to ‘‘make policy’’ and ‘‘do social justice,’’ even if they have to skirt the truth to achieve their laudable ends. The general public seldom questions Public Truth because accepting it is the precondition of being blessed with the mantle of the ‘‘openminded,’’ ‘‘tolerant,’’ and ‘‘fair.’’ Enforcing assent to Public Truth is the threat of being denied these appellations of modern goodness, and instead being branded ‘‘extremist, ‘‘ideologue,’’ or ‘‘right-wing conservative.’’ In the face of such revilement, many people simply keep quiet, speak anonymously, express their opinions sotto voce, or deny their real opinions altogether, and instead claim to believe the ideas they know they are socially expected to hold. This phenomenon is that of ‘‘preference falsification,’’ delineated by Timur Kuran, to whom we referred earlier. In fact, then, the maintenance of Public Truth is nothing but a grownup version of schoolyard bullyism: ‘‘Agree with what we say or we will call you names and hurt you.’’ Of course, as a result insufficient civic momentum—broad-based public capital—is accumulated to bring about positive reforms, such as practical repeals of institutionalized race and gender-based policies and a ban on partial-birth abortions.132 This intimidation could not succeed nationally as it so evidently has in this age of political correctness without the yeoman’s work of Public Truth’s chief enforcer—the media. In print, on television, or in the hallowed halls of National Public Radio, the cultural inertia of Public Truth is ensured. Whether through the maudlin portrayal of the ‘‘victimized’’ poor, distorted economic analyses, or simply a journalistic hymn to the liberating power of the secular city (usually done under the cloak of ‘‘commentary’’), the cardinal virtues of modern liberalism—Choice, Change, Opportunity, and Diversity—are dutifully saluted. It is under pain of excommunication from the community of the truly civil that one dissents from these pseudo-values. And pseudo-values they are, as they share in common the quality of pure formality. Each one is itself axiologically empty, without any intrinsic moral qualities. Neither Choice, Change, Opportunity, nor Diversity is good or bad in itself, but rather all depend on the antecedently established moral quality of their subjects for their own moral warrants. By themselves, none of these public pseudo-virtues bears any necessary relationship to virtue, goodness, or rationality. Hitler made his own

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choices, Stalinism was a change for Russia, Manson had various kinds of opportunity, and the North Vietnamese employed diversity in torture. Yet no morally careful person would approve of any of these exercises. Hence, the uselessness of purely formal values is quite clear. Shorn of any concrete ethical and social context, these supposed goods are amoral shells, empty conceptual hulls, serving no purpose but rhetorical intimidation. Yet, such a purpose is perfectly suited for establishing and perpetuating Public Truth, for it provides for these alleged values both the illusion of substance and the impression of importance, and hence their intimidating force. Thus, the defender of Public Truth has at the ready an arsenal of ad hominem and ad populum strategies to deal with anyone brazen enough to suggest that these values may be flawed, as in: ‘‘Only a bigot would resist diversity for its own sake’’; ‘‘It’s tyrannical and misogynistic to be ‘anti-choice’ ’’; ‘‘We all know a lack of opportunity is the cause of urban unrest.’’ Here again, awaiting the dissident from Public Truth is a public name-calling and tsk-tsk-ing that is a potent form of coercion and a very real kind of thought-control. This manner of censorship has been socially enlisted in the service of contemporary liberalism. There is a dialectical relationship between the media and Public Truth. As we have indicated, the media—especially the media elite—play an indispensable role in creating and propagating the corpus of Public Truth. But just as important to the maintenance of Public Truth, the media are constrained and controlled in their operation by the very Truths they helped create. It is, in fact, in the very process of their being controlled that the media most emphatically announce those contentions that—perversely, almost regardless of their evidential weight—have been awarded the status of Public Truth. These are the opinions one must hold if one is to be seen as ‘‘tolerant,’’ ‘‘credible,’’ and ‘‘mainstream.’’ So Public Truth has a self-perpetuating effect. By ruling the discourse of the public square, it controls the flow of criticism and new ideas. In so doing it is able to delete, edit, or simply discredit those notions that may threaten its own plausibility. Thus, Public Truth is largely its own gatekeeper; it determines admission to the realm of the ‘‘reasonable’’ and ‘‘credible’’ in public dialogue. To mount a challenge against a Public Truth is very difficult, since the morality of the challenge must be established in the face of countercharges. These recriminations will substantially be based on Public Truths, since each Public Truth is a portion of the body of interrelated ideas that partly compose contemporary liberalism, and they will claim that the challenge to a given Public Truth is unfair, unreasonable, uncompassionate, or otherwise unacceptable. Obviously, such a challenge is a difficult task, which is one important reason why contemporary liberalism continues—largely unopposed by tren-

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chant, vigorous, and public conservative counterarguments—its baleful transformation of American culture.133 The Effect of Murder in Communities One of the more horrific transformations of contemporary American life is the frequency of murder in urban settings. While obviously this is not the sole fault of the ethos of contemporary liberalism, inasmuch as contemporary liberalism has altered traditional Judeo-Christian understandings of the sacredness, uniqueness, and inviolability of each human life, it has played a part in cheapening human life and in forming the fatherless, welfare culture in inner cities that so often provides the social context for brutal murder. Indeed, it is poor black communities in inner cities that disproportionately suffer from murder. Between 1976 and 1991, the murder rate among white youth held at two to three per 100,000. But from 1976 to 1986 the murder rate for black youth was around 10 per 100,000, and then increased to 14 per 100,000 in 1988 and 20 per 100,000 in 1991.134 Over the past decade black males aged 14 to 24, who compose just over 1 percent of the national population, have accounted for 9 to 17 percent of all homicide victims and 17 to 30 percent of all homicide perpetrators.135 Of course, as economist Glenn Loury has written, black crime is a problem of ‘‘sin, not skin.’’136 There is no inherently racial component to this tragedy. How might we begin rehumanizing these and other communities? You can tell what someone values by how they act when they lose it. Similarly, you can tell what a country values by how it responds when what it values is threatened. Certainly, then, the sad truth is that in the United States we do not sufficiently value innocent human life, because as the body count from murder rises with each passing day, we continue only to shake our heads, sigh with frustration and fear, and marvel at the brutality surrounding us. But we can begin the process of recovering an understanding of the priceless, irreplaceable nature of every human person by doing something we have generally not yet done in our communities: institutionalize the memory of innocent people ripped from this earth by murder. One effective way to do this is to have schoolchildren study the whole life—and lost future—of an innocent murder victim, as well as the impact of the loss on the victim’s family. Students will come to truly know that each life was full and unique, and tightly connected to a set of other equally full and special lives. Children will no longer see murder victims as objects—anonymous stories in the news—but as persons just like them, with feelings, fears, hopes, and a family who loved them deeply. By helping young people gain a sense of the personality of the victim

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and the enduring agony suffered by the murder victims’ survivors, we humanize the murdered. We return to them the individuality stolen by both the brevity of a news account and our numbness to the horror of the loss—a numbness born of the sheer frequency and heartlessness of the killing. Our schools can regularly devote parts of school days to studying the life of a murder victim. Children can learn where and when a murder victim was born, how old she was when she first walked, and what her first word was. Perhaps they might see her first baby picture, or a picture of her in the school play. How did she like to decorate her bedroom at home? What were her hobbies, and what were her special talents? Did she like to play any sports? Who was her family, what did her parents do for a living? What kind of music did she like, who was her favorite singer? As schoolchildren learn these details, the personhood of the murder victim will be resurrected, and students will come to see something of the permanence of murder, its epic unfairness, and how we have cheapened human life. They will also gain a faint taste of the searing agony and intense turmoil of soul endured for years and years by those whose child—or parent or spouse—has been murdered. This would sensitize children to the preciousness of life. There are other steps we as a society can take to institutionalize the memory of innocent lives stolen. These might include, for example, public service ads on radio, television, in magazines and newspapers, presenting very brief biographies of murder victims who would otherwise remain unknown to the public forever. Similarly, we could begin a regular moment of silence before the national anthem at sporting events, or instead, a reading of a small biography of a murder victim. Imagine if before the next Laker basketball game, the public address announcer read a two-minute biography of Davey Fortson, a southern California college basketball player who was senselessly murdered recently. Mistaken for a gang member, he was shot while standing outside a hamburger stand. The impact this memoriam might have on the minds of those present could contribute to our re-civilization. Certainly, without it Davey’s tragic death—to the public—will be just another component of last year’s murder statistics. His priceless life and promising future will slip through our consciousness just as so many before him have. Who of us today contemplates, let alone remembers, the unspeakably precious stolen lives of our murdered neighbors? In southern California alone, the roll call of those unjustly taken and often forgotten includes David Abraham, Alfred Clark, Ennis Cosby, Davey Fortson, Justin Green, Angela Southall, Cheri Lynn Huss, Go Matsaura, Martin Ganz, Robin Brandley, Bill Seiler, Lynette Murray, Corinne Novis, Wendy Osbourne, Nicole Parker, and the Ryen family. For the sake of our own social welfare and for the dignity of the vic-

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tims, we—as a culture—need to purposely and systematically remember murdered people. We need to hear the names of murder victims until they permeate our public consciousness. Their names and the humanizing facts of their lives ought to become our sad and desperate mantra, our cry for—and commitment to—a humane future. How then has random murder affected communities? How does the prevalence of murder affect our society nationally? I would like to suggest that one important consequence seldom considered is the deep, psychic uneasiness and instability it insinuates within people. Every childhood is filled with the same primal panic: there is a monster hiding in the closet; there is something under the bed; a stranger is looking at you through the window. But with the comforting word of mommy or daddy, the flick of a light switch, and a deep breath, the terror recedes, and we are lulled back to sleep by the calming assurance, ‘‘Everything’s OK, everything is going to be OK.’’ With the maturity of adulthood, we learn to rationally understand our fears and uncertainties, and we realize that we can exercise a measure of psychological control over our lives. We can turn the light on, open the closet and look under the bed, and see for ourselves that our awful imaginations are not reality. We can trust that there is a certain order to the world and a reliability to our experience, and that some things—the terrible things lurking in the darkest corners of our minds—just don’t happen. It is our ultimate nightmare that this trust be disproved, that the darkness overpower the light, and that a genuine, evil monster burst into the tranquility of our home, harming us and our family. Now, today, as the body count rises from brutal murder, we must acknowledge that the social equivalent of this personal horror has in fact happened in urban America. The new bogeyman is random, senseless murder, and as daily news accounts of violent attacks attest, he could get any of us, or anyone we love, at any time, anywhere. It is part of the bane of this beast that the reason for an attack is as prosaic as it is outrageous: a robbery, a carjacking, a gang initiation, some kids were just bored. If there were clear and consistent reasons for killings, we could respond rationally and eliminate our risk of being victimized. But the tortuous reign of this monster of murder is such that his work can neither be anticipated nor prevented, neither expected nor thwarted. We follow rules that convince us that we have inoculated ourselves against his sudden and deadly bite: don’t go out at night, carry a weapon, don’t drive a nice-looking car, regard everyone suspiciously, stay out of the ‘‘bad’’ neighborhoods. But the fact is that each of these measures is no guarantee of safety, if any help at all. They are only placebos, convincing us that we have temporarily outsmarted the beast

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and protected ourselves, something akin to pulling the bedcovers over our heads. As we frantically try to figure out some way to protect ourselves, we do not realize the ways in which our lives have been altered by the now routine assaults. Just as an individual who has been traumatized by a horrible event can experience stress and psychological problems long afterward, so a society can manifest similar reactions, writ large: anger, paranoia, desensitization to violence, indifference to human suffering. In the same way, the fiction of the bogeyman has a mesmerizing effect on a child; thus, the chilling reality of the social bogeyman of murder has a paralyzing consequence for communities. Liberties become constrained, suspicions and stereotypes about one another grow, and our corporate vision of life and its possibilities dims under his regime. That our communities display these pathologies is apparent, but the long-term ramifications are not so clear and are impossible to foresee. Eventually, a culture will be fatigued by fear and slip into an indifferent nihilism, where the taking of a human life goes unnoticed and the inherent dignity of the human person is obscured by the unnaturally strong psychological effort exerted, from day to day, to hold the true bogeyman at bay. How will our lives and our communities be different ten years hence, after the bogeyman has destroyed thousands more families?137 All we have is the cursed certainty that once the bogeyman is known to be real, the sanctity and security of our psychological bedroom have been violated, and it will never feel truly safe or restful again. ABORTION The acrimony and cultural conflict over racial politics is rivaled only by that over abortion politics, partly because, perhaps more than any other issue, one’s position on abortion is an index to one’s view of so many other values: self-responsibility, autonomy, God, authority, sexuality, family, and others.138 But in the mind of the pro-life partisan, abortion is an issue of utterly unique significance, since abortion is a life and death issue. No one dies in controversies over taxes, affirmative action, immigration policy, or gay rights. But a significant segment of the American population understands that virtually all of the 1.5 million abortions performed annually in this country are the unjustified killing of an innocent human being. The deliberate, systematic, ultimate disenfranchisement of a class of human beings is the most profound assault on human dignity possible in any social order. In the United States today, the unwanted unborn are our lebensunwertes Leben—lives we decide are unworthy of life. They are outside the protection of the law and beyond the reach of general social compassion.

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Yet, before serious progress in this most basic of human rights battles—the right to life—can be achieved, bombings of abortion sites and other violent crimes must be vigorously condemned by pro-life citizens as beyond the pale of legitimate social protest.139 The pro-life movement is only as persuasive as its moral integrity is unassailable. Thus anything less than aggressive, categorical denunciation of such terroristic attacks is both hypocritical and insufficient. The pro-life campaign, as a nonviolent movement, must be consistent if it is to be successful. Dr. King knew this about nonviolent protest, and so did Mahatma Gandhi.140 Unless those seeking to defend prenatal human life in this country forcefully assert this essential truth, their cause will stall. The well-tended facade of compassion and fairness that has hidden the moral shambles of abortion advocacy for twenty-four years has begun to crack, with the naked horror of partial-birth abortion exposed, and prominent pro-choice figures like Naomi Wolf and Norma McCorvey acknowledging the reality of death that defines abortion.141 Pro-life citizens who wish to further this progress should unequivocally reject the culture of death, especially when those who claim their mantle participate in it. Beyond this, pro-life protest would further enhance its public standing if it emphasized the substantial parallels between itself and the original civil rights movement led by Dr. King. A devout Christian in religious belief, Dr. King would have easily seen the harmony between his movement and the fight for the right to life: each cause working on behalf of a dehumanized class of human beings; each fighting a politically and culturally entrenched power structure; each opposing the convenience of some citizens on behalf of the fundamental rights of others. Indeed, much should be made of the reality that the pro-life movement affirms human dignity with its message and interpersonal social strategy: the equal intrinsic value of all human life, the embrace of adoption, the involvement of voluntary associations such as churches and civic groups in helping women with crisis pregnancies, and by establishing crisis pregnancy centers—staffed largely with volunteers—to help troubled women.142 Pro-life dissent from the spirit of our selfish and violent age should also emphasize its continuity with the founding principles of this country: legal equality for every human being; compassion for the vulnerable and defenseless; the inalienability of the right to live. The for-profit slaughter of 1.5 million innocent, pre-born human beings each year is hardly consistent with the self-understanding of a nation as ‘‘the land of the free, and the home of the brave.’’ The profile of America with a reformed abortion law, one more similar to the moderate contours found in European countries, would be more recognizable as the shining city on a hill we have always aspired to be.143

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When we look at the history of social change in this country, we are given hope for a restoration of moderation in abortion law—a humble initial goal that the pro-life movement should embrace. The move to abolish slavery, the granting of women’s suffrage, and the end of Jim Crow all were preceded by a gradual awakening of the national conscience to injustice and human suffering, an awakening nurtured by consistent nonviolent protest. Socially entrenched attitudes and norms, however inhumane, take time to uproot. Given the moral progress of this country on other questions of basic human rights, there is clear social precedent for the confidence that one day we will rue and at least partially reverse our profound devaluation of pre-born human life. Almost no one in this country today believes abortion itself to be morally good. That is the great and ironic common ground in this most intractable battle of the culture war. Pro-life Americans, armed with the preservational wisdom of Solomon and the unwavering patience of Job, can demonstrate the moral vision and strength of conscience that will lead this prodigal nation back to the recognition of a truth that the civil rights movement bore witness to, and which this country once held to be self-evident: all people are created equal. We will now turn to six points of analysis concerning abortion and the sustenance provided it by contemporary liberalism. Four of these points reflect on the cultural consequences of American abortion practice, and two are brief critiques of common abortion arguments. The Contradiction of the American Mind Anyone who has ever experienced childbirth, or seen ultrasound exams of a fetus months before he is born, cannot help but be struck by the unparalleled beauty and patent humanity of prenatal life. And yet, the unsettling fact is that in our country prenatal life can be violently destroyed for any reason. A bizarre doublemindedness exists in American life: we personally and institutionally cherish unborn human beings—and devote substantial resources to bring them to birth—while at the same time we personally and institutionally destroy them, all depending on the pregnant woman’s attitude toward them, an attitude often distorted by pressure from the man in her life to abort.144 Consider these bizarre incidents, and the tortured, nonsensical rationalizations offered to help maintain the social fiction—authored and supported by contemporary liberalism—that pre-born human beings are not really human beings, and we are morally justified in doing to them whatever we wish: • A man in Texas was convicted of manslaughter when, while driving drunk, he hit a car in which a seven and a half month pregnant woman

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was riding. The baby was born shortly after the accident, and within two days died from injuries she suffered as a result of the accident. In language at once Orwellian and yet chillingly honest, the last sentence of the article about this tragedy reads, ‘‘Abortion rights supporters warned that it [the conviction] could lead to a new determination of when life begins, and, eventually, the outlawing of abortion.’’145 • A woman in Wisconsin was charged with attempted homicide for purposely trying to drink her nearly full-term baby to death. The woman’s defense attorney argued that the woman had not committed a crime by law, because her alcoholic assault on her unborn child took place before the baby had been born. Absurdly, the attorney asserted, ‘‘The alleged victim was not a human being.’’ The baby, named Meagan, was born after the woman’s drinking binge, with facial abnormalities, including a compressed nose and wide-set eyes. Her future mental abilities are not known. The baby was placed in foster care, where her progress has been reported as slow.146 • Recently, a woman shot herself in the stomach in order to kill the twentyweek fetus inside of her. The baby survived the attack, and was born alive, but later died after efforts to save him. The woman, 19 years of age, was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.147 Of course, had she aborted in an abortion clinic, killing the child—at the same stage of development and even later—would have been perfectly legal. • Recently a twenty-four-week old fetus received life-saving surgery while still in utero.148 But had the mother wished to have this same fetus killed through abortion, in every state of the nation it would have been legal for her to do so. • In California, the state Supreme Court has held that someone who causes the death of a fetus as early as seven weeks can be charged with fetal murder.149 This does not apply to doctors who, with the mothers’ consent, sometimes cause the death of fetuses much later in pregnancy. • The ACLU argued that a 1970 California law against fetal murder could not be used against a pregnant woman who caused the stillbirth of her full-term unborn baby by going on a two-day drug spree just before the child’s birth, because the law violated the woman’s right to privacy by intruding on her freedom to make decisions about childbearing and health care.150 In California, such prenatal abuses of the fetus are usually not prosecuted, in deference to strongly influential feminist lobbies and the powerful abortion establishment.151

Contemporary liberalism, with its apotheosis of ‘‘choice’’ and personal freedom, its aversion to personal responsibility, its debased equation of human dignity with self-esteem and its conceptual inability to embrace the classical, Judeo-Christian understanding of intrinsic, inviolable human dignity, has provided the social context in which these atrocities occur. Yet, regardless of the prevailing perverse individual, legal, and social attitudes toward pre-born human beings, nothing changes in the nature

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of the human fetus. The aborted are intrinsically no different from those who survive the vagaries of choice. If allowed to be born, they would be as beautiful and full of promise as the wanted. But as a society we have decided that membership in the human family is determined not by biology, but by a mother’s feelings toward her offspring. We have declared that human life does not have absolute value—some lives are worth more than others. This is a dangerous and slippery slope, for who will we subjectivize next? Black Americans again? Homosexuals? The elderly, infirm, or terminally ill? Indeed, this latter category has in many ways already been put seriously at risk of euthanasia by the abortion ethic.152 How ironic that each election year we agonize over the economic consequences of illegal immigration and the fairness of affirmative action. Meanwhile, we countenance the ultimate disenfranchisement of an entire class of human beings. The common resort to ‘‘I oppose abortion, but I support a woman’s right to choose’’ does not relieve us of this hypocrisy, since no one who holds this confession would allow the killing of people living outside a woman’s womb. The logic of choice must perversely hold that the unborn—unless their mother wants them—are not human beings worth including in the human community.153 Thus, we have accepted the fundamental basis of all human rights violations in the world: the idea that humanity is subjective and that the powerful may bestow human standing on the vulnerable as they will. The profound contradiction between how we treat the unborn when they are wanted and what we do to them when they are not wanted creates a corrosive social consciousness of might makes right and moral relativism. The shallow mental habits cultivated by ‘‘choice’’ convince us that our will to power is morally unproblematic and that our choices are self-validating. Yet, some thirty-four years after the advent of abortion on demand, can we honestly say that our national soul and moral culture have not been coarsened and brutalized by the selfish anthem ‘‘My body, my choice’’? It is an undeniable objective reality that the unborn are us, just as we all were once them. The human fetus is a self-contained teleological system, with a clear goal in mind (birth), and it is a homeorrhetic organism, capable of carrying out a coherent bodily process (growth), in an ordered way over time. Babies, after all, are not delivered by the stork. A birth is the culmination of a natural, continuous, and ordered process of growth that began at the union of sperm and egg. Indeed, the very word ‘‘fetus’’— Latin for ‘‘offspring’’—has primarily developmental, not ontological, significance. That is, it denotes a definite and fully established type of being at a certain stage of its existence, not a being that is different in kind from what it will later become. Humanity is an essence, not a property. It is not possible

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to be partly human and partly something else. Talk of partial humanness is incoherent, for it requires a touchstone to determine full humanity, and yet, where is such a criterion? Why is it justified? How do we know it is reliable? What are the units in which we measure humanity? What is the remaining ontological character of beings that are only ‘‘partially’’ human?154 If we better harmonize our social lives with our moral sense by recognizing the inviolable dignity of each human life, we will humanize our culture and take halting steps toward living the full meaning of our national creed: all people are created—not born—equal. An Awkward Silence Lately, the popular press has paid some attention to the horrific sexselective abortions practiced in some Asian countries, particularly China and India. In these countries female fetuses are, as a matter of course— for statist and misogynistic reasons—killed. But the obvious and disturbing parallels to the abortion culture in this country are carefully being left undrawn. In China and India, if a woman is pregnant with a girl, she is likely to have an abortion—at either governmental or cultural urging. But if she is carrying a boy—and she has not exceeded any state limits on childbearing—all is well, and celebrations will surely ensue. (Do feminist champions of abortion as ‘‘female empowerment’’ see this tragic irony? Some feminists and other women certainly do, since, despite the efforts of groups like NOW and NARAL to give the impression that all women are avidly pro-choice, many women, even feminists, are intensely prolife.)155 In China and India the baby’s worth is determined by factors external to the baby, and whether or not it lives or dies depends on other peoples’ attitudes about it. So it is in this country, where the right of the unborn to be born is absolutely trumped—during the first two trimesters, and for all practical purposes given elastic exceptions allowing abortions if a pregnancy is claimed to be detrimental to a woman’s ‘‘psychological health’’ and during the third trimester as well—by the right of the woman to choose whether or not to allow the birth. In this country, the ground of the fetus’s desirability is not her gender (usually), but the psycho-emotional disposition of the pregnant woman. Thus, unborn human beings—full of life and potential—are aborted, sometimes very late, and often for undeniably incoherent and banal reasons. This is the consequence of defining the worth of the fetus on the basis of factors external to the fetus. Once we begin down the slippery slope of understanding the value of pre-born human beings on the basis of extrinsic circumstances and not their immutable intrinsic dignity, we

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can no longer speak in a consistent moral voice, since this requires explicitly arbitrating between the worth of the unborn child and the strength of reasons for aborting. This sensible ethical task is all but verboten today. A woman’s desires, we are told, however transient, selfish, or distorted by her crisis, must always hold absolute sway over the human being whose life her body naturally guards, and they cannot be gainsaid. It is not ‘‘compassionate’’ to her otherwise. Thus, as a society we stammer inarticulately in the face of abortion practices in China and India, which almost everyone finds emetic. Yet if we would refuse to believe the deterministic fiction that biology is social destiny—and therefore that pregnancy is an oppression—we might be able to say out loud what we silently know is true: most abortions in this country are also utterly without any justification, and should not be legal. In doing this, we would better harmonize our social lives with our moral sense, humanize our culture, and lead the world in the most important of ways: standing for the dignity of all human life. Whose interests are served by the American culture’s studied ethical myopia concerning abortion? Obviously not the unborn child’s. Nor can it truly be the woman’s, since she must live with the haunting and hurtful knowledge of what she has done and what might have been, of a future that might have turned out much brighter than the dark scenarios she imagined, and perhaps believed, possibly as a means of selfjustification and emotional self-protection.156 Rather, the extremely lucrative abortion industry is the entity truly served by this country’s general moral complacency about abortion. Yet, no matter how loudly the abortion industry and its acolytes in much of American feminism proclaim that the abortion debate is over, the public conscience of this country persists in its uneasiness about the topic. Whether prompted by reports of the sex-selective abortions practiced in some Asian countries, or by the publicized details of our own grisly partial-birth abortion procedure—cravenly supported by selfproclaimed children’s advocates Bill and Hillary Clinton—the American mind is slowly beginning to lose sleep over the realities of our abortion practice. But what is strange about this rumbling public sentiment is the moral stuttering accompanying it. No one seems able to say, for example, why it is unfair to abort only nascent females, and no one seems able to say why it is wrong to allow late-term abortions on healthy babies that deliver all of a baby except her head, and then suction her brains out. This awkward silence is the natural product of the near total disenfranchisement of the unborn human being that the abortion debate in this country has accomplished. Aren’t unborn human beings objectively worth something? Influential elements of American culture (e.g., the Democratic party and feminist and abortion lobbies) have been acting as if

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they’re not, but still, intuitively, we know they are, and we are offended at their wholesale degradation. The ‘‘woman’s right to choose’’ slogan and the politically shrewd but fatuous positing of abortion as the linchpin of female equality have induced an ethical impotence and social silence that keep us from giving voice to our common-sense moral sentiments about the injustice and unfairness of fetal destruction and gender-selective abortions. This then is perhaps the final paradox which the abortion culture has insinuated within American society: we are unable to clearly explain why what we know to be wrong is in fact wrong. Partial-Birth Abortion Perhaps no other feature of the abortion culture in America exposes the depths to which we have sunk than does the recent debate over the so-called partial-birth abortion procedure. In this bloody and violent ‘‘procedure,’’ also called the D & X (Dilation and Extraction), the doctor pulls all of the fully developed baby except the head down into the vagina. The doctor then takes a pair of blunt scissors and forces the scissors into the base of the baby’s skull, spreading it to enlarge the opening. Using a suction catheter, he then sucks out the brain of the human being, killing him or her. Dr. Martin Haskell, who teaches the procedure to other doctors at National Abortion Federation seminars, has done this more than 700 times to unborn babies twenty to twentysix weeks developed.157 The nature of the 1996–1997 debate over the attempt to ban partialbirth abortions was predictably acrimonious.158 It also was fraught with misconceptions and falsehoods, foremost among them that the partialbirth abortion procedure is performed only to save the life of the mother or to preserve her fertility.159 Dr. Warren Hern, for example, openly acknowledged performing late-term, partial-birth abortions purely for convenience sake, and he has unhesitatingly counseled other doctors to censor the information about this procedure and other aspects of their work that may reach the public, lest they suffer a public backlash if the true nature of their ‘‘medical practice’’ become widely known.160 This gruesome procedure was emphatically shown to be commonly used on the healthy babies of healthy mothers, without any medical necessity. For example, at one abortion clinic in Englewood, New Jersey, doctors acknowledged that in one year they perform over 1,500 partial birth abortions, and ‘‘only a miniscule amount [of those] are for [alleged] medical reasons.’’161 Two other doctors who performed this procedure admitted that many of these types of procedures they performed were purely elective, and were not done to save the mother’s life or because the fetus was deformed.162

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But this reality was not widely known during the 1996 debate over the issue, because throughout the media the general impression was given that it was a genuine medical debate as to whether or not the procedure was ever medically necessary. There is a virtual consensus that the procedure is unnecessary. Dr. Pamela Smith, director of medical education in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago, wrote in the American Medical Association’s publication American Medical News (November 20, 1995): ‘‘There are absolutely no obstetrical situations encountered in this country which require a partially-delivered human fetus to be destroyed to preserve the health of the mother.’’163 Public misrepresentations about the medical value of this procedure became so blatant that the Physicians’ Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth was founded by four doctors specifically for the purpose of exposing the medically fraudulent and true moral nature of partial-birth abortion.164 The partial-birth abortion debate—which at this writing still continues in this same fog of confusion—has featured many controversies, including the ads of 1996 congressional candidates in California and Illinois, which showed bloodied, third-trimester fetuses killed by partial-birth abortion. The gruesome images, which ran on television, were accompanied by the angelic singing of young children. The jarring contrast of human innocence and human mutilation drew the ire of media critics, feminist leaders, and pro-choice activists who thought the ads exploitative and inflammatory. Yet, no one disgruntled with the commercials offered a defense of the partial-birth abortion practice, the results of which are accurately presented in the photographs that comprised the ad. The brute fact, plainly stated by George F. Will, is that partial-birth abortion is murder itself.165 Apparently, those individuals troubled by the ads did not want to draw the common-sense inference that if the images are so revolting that we cannot bear to view them, then perhaps the practice causing those images is so revolting that it should not be permitted. But, fortunately, most citizens were open-minded enough to reach this obvious conclusion about partial-birth abortions, and as a consequence, many abortion opponents are starting to recognize that the future of their movement lies in the visual rather than the verbal. The tragic, grisly empirical proof of a life slaughtered will have a much stronger impact on the conscience of the nation than will more slogans and speeches. Those humanitarians who make their living committing abortions believe this too, and so seek to control the images seen by the public. Hence, as mentioned earlier, abortion doctor Warren Hern has recommended to his colleagues that in dealing with the media, they ‘‘should provide as much factual information as possible, but the information

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should be appropriate for public consumption.’’166 In other words, make sure nothing too graphic is seen or described. Yet, if it were recommended that pictures of women battered by their husbands be tamed for the newspaper or television news, feminists would raise cries of censorship and coverup. We quite rightly insist that the public behold the work of injustice, so its disturbing visage will serve as a motivation for redress and change. This is a rich tradition in American public life, from Sheriff Bull Connor’s dogs snapping at peaceful civil rights protestors to the famous napalm-scalded Vietnamese girl running terrified down a road to the haunting, emaciated bodies of African famine victims. The gory remains of a near fully developed and totally innocent pre-born baby who died in agonizing pain at the hands of a for-profit abortionist is a case-in-point of an offensive picture exposing an offensive act. But, as is often the case in our culture, the obscenities of abortion and abortion practice are given a special dispensation of tolerance. Predictably, partial-birth abortions never became much of an actual campaign issue in the 1996 presidential race. Bill Clinton carefully avoided it, and the Dole organization lacked the moral courage and strategic insight to pursue it. (Polls showed that about 75 percent of the public disapproved of Clinton’s veto of a bill that would have outlawed the procedure.) Had the Dole campaign addressed the topic, they would have easily established that, as the Physicians’ Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth has declared, ‘‘No partial birth abortion is ever medically indicated. . . . [T]here is no obstetrical situation that requires the willful destruction of a partially delivered baby to protect the life, health or future fertility of a woman.’’167 The procedure is simply an innovation in the trade, one that enables ‘‘physicians’’ like Hern and Haskell to perform more abortions and therefore make more money. If anyone is to be called to task for exploiting the corpses of aborted, viable fetuses, it should not be those bold enough to hold before us the consequences of our abortion culture. Rather, we should direct our contempt at contemporary liberalism and the social devolution it is authoring that has brought us to the point where, in the name of ‘‘women’s rights,’’ we cannot even extend compassion to an utterly innocent baby whose body has been born, but whose head is held in the birth canal while she is sadistically killed so her death can qualify as an abortion. Of what more shameful act can human societies—and the philosophies that sustain them—be guilty? ‘‘Choice’’ and Fatherlessness Unsurprisingly, the institutionalization of abortion on demand in American life has had extremely damaging social consequences. Perhaps

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foremost among these bitter fruits is a social pathology that is not often directly associated with abortion on demand: fatherlessness. Despite long-term liberal denial, it is now nearly a truism that there is a crisis of fatherlessness in this country.168 This is apparent by the simple fact that each night about forty percent of American children go to sleep in a home where their fathers do not live.169 Whether deadbeat dads, absent dads, or men who have never accepted paternity for their children, many American men have unilaterally decided that their acts of sexual intercourse do not in any way obligate them morally to the offspring that may result. Of late, a spate of detailed sociological studies have been published documenting the personal and social destructiveness of this trend. Few, however, have broached the obvious but politically incorrect possibility that the withering of American fatherhood is significantly related to the liberal social ethos erected during the past three decades in order to support the culture of ‘‘choice.’’ If we consider the psychological effects on men of our cultural saturation with the principle of ‘‘choice,’’ it’s not hard to understand why men are becoming ‘‘pro-choice’’ about fatherhood. The ethical imperative of ‘‘my body, my choice’’ has meant that women can decide whether or not to give birth once they become pregnant. But this principle—that personal, bodily acts (like sexual intercourse) only require one’s moral commitments if one wants them to— has not remained confined to the narrow preserve of abortion rights. Through prominent repetition over the years, it has become installed in the general public consciousness as an all-purpose—but very lowgrade—ethical touchstone for determining what one’s moral duties are. So, women choose whether to become mothers, or more accurately, whether to give birth to the children they conceive. They choose whether or not to become mothers in the social sense. But men do not choose to become fathers. In fact, women—by electing either to obtain or not to obtain an abortion—choose for men whether men will become fathers (in the social sense), and whether men will be legally obligated to pay, over the course of nearly two decades, a substantial amount of money in child support. The one-sidedness of this decision power is patent.170 Men’s objections to it—which are rare because of the de rigueur assent to ‘‘choice’’ and the intimidating feminist scorn that awaits any objection—are met with the retort, ‘‘Don’t have intercourse if you’re not ready to accept the duties of a father.’’ But the same logic, ‘‘Don’t have intercourse if you’re not ready to accept the duties of a mother,’’ does not apply to women. They are allowed to choose whether or not to be a parent. Since men know that the woman they’ve impregnated could just as easily obtain an abortion as give birth to the child, they reason that if she foregoes the abor-

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tion—and they do not wish to assume the varied and sustained obligations of fatherhood—then the woman should have sole responsibility for the child. Why should I be responsible, he thinks, when she could have had an abortion? If she wants to choose to be a mother, that’s fine for her, but she should not be able to influence my social and economic future by choosing for me whether I am to be a father.171 My body, my choice. So fatherhood and the obligations attendant to it are optional, just as motherhood and the obligations attendant to it are optional. Men have learned from the culture of ‘‘choice’’ that children’s interests can permissibly be subjugated to their own personal desires, should the two conflict. Thus, our cultural enthroning of ‘‘choice’’ communicates to fathers, as it does to mothers, that children need not really be our top priority. But beyond fomenting fatherlessness, ‘‘choice’’ has also worked to disengage men from their offspring, since their offspring don’t socially become their offspring unless the woman wants them to. Hence, some men are psychologically ill-prepared to participate in raising their children once they are born, because they have suspended the development of a parental sense within themselves, obviously not wanting to experience the pain of having emotionally embraced their child only to lose the child to abortion. The sustained uncertainty that the possibility of abortion presents can even subtly turn a man’s offspring into a menace in his own eyes, for its potential demise becomes the source of considerable anxiety. This uncertainty, plus the powerful cultural ascendancy of ‘‘a woman’s right to choose,’’ demotivates men from seeking to encourage the formation within themselves of emotional and psychological ties to their children. A man is understandably hesitant to embark down the existentially profound road of fatherhood if he is unsure—and utterly powerless to establish—that his child will actually be born. I’m reminded of the neo-Marxist/eco-feminist man I knew in graduate school who informed me with genuine elation and humble joy that his fiance´ was pregnant. When I saw him a week later, his ashen face and seething rage underlined the anguish he said he felt at learning that his fiance´ had just aborted their pre-born child. He, like so many men today, learned that the law of ‘‘choice’’ is a great wall separating him from his nascent children. Of course, had he not wished to be a father, this wall would have become a passageway to the abandonment of his most profound purpose as a man. How tragic it is that what is thought to be the empowerment of women—‘‘choice’’—at the same time discourages men from entering into fatherhood and so contributes to the profound social corrosion wrought by fatherlessness. It is a chimera indeed to believe that American society can restore a culture of responsible fatherhood while still abiding the facile rhetoric of ‘‘my body, my choice.’’

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Abortion Myths The approximately one-half billion dollar per year abortion industry is shielded by deeply entrenched and culturally accepted ‘‘public truths.’’ These ideas, encapsulated in slogans and sayings, are repeated consistently by supporters of ‘‘choice,’’ and they have now become part of the American consciousness. Very gradually, however, these ideas are starting to lose their public cogency and are beginning to be seen as the propagandistic shibboleths they are. These politically correct imperatives include the following myths.172 Myth #1: ‘‘Abortion is between a woman and her doctor.’’ Both government reports and Planned Parenthood statistics consistently show that the overwhelming majority of abortions occur in highvolume abortion clinics, not in the office of a woman’s personal physician.173 The woman often does not meet the unfamiliar doctor until she is already gowned and in stirrups, prepped for the abortion. And, of course, clinic doctors are not available for postabortion counseling. Women who are troubled must find counseling on their own, as did Nancyjo Mann, founder of Women Exploited by Abortion. Abortion was hardly an empowering experience for her; she wrote, ‘‘For two hours I could feel her struggling inside me. But then, as suddenly as it began, she stopped. Even today, I remember her very last kick on my left side. She had no strength left. She gave up and died. Despite my grief and guilt, I was relieved that her pain was finally over. But I was never the same again. The abortion killed not only my daughter, it killed a part of me.’’174 Abortion is not between a woman and her doctor, but rather a woman, a pre-born child, and a for-profit abortionist. Myth # 2: ‘‘A woman has a right to control her own body.’’ This is a literally true statement, but in the context of abortion, it is deceptive, because it assumes that abortion is an act of simple selfcontrol. In fact, abortion is just the opposite. Having an abortion most definitely is not an example of controlling one’s body. To abort is to surrender control of one’s body in a most complete way. It is to acknowledge that one’s lack of self-control has created an intolerable situation and that one must now submit to a thoroughly unnatural procedure to remedy this situation. Significantly, substantially more than one-third of women who have aborted report they did so in capitulation to pressure from someone else, usually a man.175 This hardly presents abortion as the act of women’s self-assertion that advocates of ‘‘choice’’ describe. Abortion liberates men, not women; it frees men from sexual responsibility and restraint.176 Every woman naturally has reproductive freedom, which is one reason why rape is a crime. But when a woman—or man—willingly engages in sexual intercourse, the one action possible between a man and a

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woman which could result in a new human being, those individuals incur basic moral duties toward that new human being. At this human being’s prenatal stage, these duties consist primarily of not harming him. This primary obligation is a corollary of the natural, nonderogable right to life possessed by that new human being. Myth # 3: ‘‘No one knows when human life begins.’’ Of course we do. The unborn human being has a unique and permanent genetic identity (since conception); a beating heart (since three and a half weeks); detectable brain activity (since six weeks); fully formed fingers, toes, and all internal organs (since eight weeks).177 By three months, this human being is forming fists, bending arms, curling toes, and rapidly growing. This is not a potential life; it is an actual life, with potential. This reality is so compelling that even leading pro-choice feminists like Naomi Wolf have acknowledged it and have called for their comrades to frankly admit that every abortion kills a human life.178 Nevertheless, in language worthy of George Orwell, professional advocates of legal abortion persist in feigning wonderment at whether or not the fetus is a living human being. The logic against them could not be more elementary. First, the unborn entity is an actual being, it is alive. If this were not so, there would be no need for an abortion. The very purpose of the abortion is to kill that which is alive. Second, this being is human. What else could it be? feline? canine? bovine? As Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Il) once quipped, ‘‘No woman has ever given birth to a Golden Retriever.’’ Human beings give birth to human beings. It is disingenuous to claim that a fetus is not a definite, living human being. Those who have seen ultrasound images of pre-born babies have eyewitness, empirical evidence of the unborns’ living humanity. Myth #4: ‘‘The abortion decision is always made with great difficulty and regret.’’ While this is true in many instances, it strikes me as cause to restrict legality, not promote it. Besides, the simple fact that each year more than 40 percent of the 1.5 million abortions performed are obtained by women who have already had at least one legal abortion shows that abortion is often used as contraception after the fact. Thus, the destruction of unborn human beings is simply not a matter of deep concern to a great many people. Myth #5: ‘‘Doctors never suggest abortion unless it is necessary to save the life of the mother.’’ Since there is legal precedent for litigation against doctors based on ‘‘wrongful birth’’—the infant through his agent (usually a parent) brings suit, claiming it would be better not to have been born than to have been born with a disability or deformity—doctors can be quick to raise the possibility of abortion, even though it may not be strictly medically indicated (it virtually never is). There is incentive for them to do this,

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because there is no balancing legal concept of ‘‘wrongful abortion.’’ Some women have received self-interested recommendations from doctors to abort and then proceeded to do so simply on the basis of the doctor’s authority, when it was medically unnecessary. Since the fetus can be aborted for any reason, in a complicated pregnancy the doctor—to protect his financial and professional status—may be quick to suggest, if not clearly recommend (in convincing clinical language), the alternative of abortion. In this way, the abortion license can corrupt sound medical practice.179 ‘‘Choice’’ Strutting as a legitimate term of civic debate, ‘‘choice’’ is in fact a vacant conceptual hull, entirely dependent on its subject for moral meaning. By design, the abortion culture has imbued this otherwise purely formal idea with major symbolic significance. The declaration of ‘‘a woman’s right to choose,’’ without even specifying what it is she is entitled to choose, is widely understood to compel respect and to foreclose on public, rigorous debate. Without question, ‘‘choice’’ is the byword of what passes for public debate today. It has become entrenched as the monosyllabic representation of the puerile and absolutistic moral antinomianism that is the ‘‘pro-choice’’ side of the abortion debate. It is commonly used in now ritualized exchanges as a kind of conceptual trump card, the idea thought to be so argumentatively compelling that it should obviate any further discussion. Given the prominence of this word and the importance many ascribe to it, it is odd that the concept of choice has not been the object of closer scrutiny. This is because such examination reveals the fundamentally amoral nature of this concept, and thus its inability to function autonomously as an ethically justifying consideration. This ethical impotence is only heightened when the subject is as morally significant a topic as abortion. Contrary to the implications of its popular usage, choice is not a moral value. It is merely a faculty of the will, a formal category. Choice itself is an axiologically empty process, without any intrinsic moral qualities. It is neither good nor bad in itself, but rather depends on the antecedently established moral quality of its subject for its own moral warrant. Choice alone, shorn of any ethical and social context, is simply a mechanical mental operation, much like adding two and two. By itself, choice bears absolutely no relationship to virtue, goodness, or rationality. It is nothing but the naked exercise of one’s will. So to say ‘‘I am for choice’’ is to say nothing more ethically significant and morally meaningful than ‘‘I am for the mental process of making decisions.’’

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But does the simple fact that a decision has been made automatically render that decision morally justified? Obviously not. The worth of our decisions or choices is not independent of the courses decided or the ends chosen. Indeed, the moral quality of our choices is wholly determined by what it is we have chosen to do and why we have chosen it. Both as individuals and as a public, we routinely approve or disapprove of individual and social choices based on the content and substance of those choices. The recent national regret over interning Japanese Americans during World War II and the current cultural vigilance regarding racism and hate crimes all attest to our felt need to morally evaluate the substance of choices. Clearly, on matters of deep moral significance, like abortion, to be in favor of making a choice is not ethically responsible. One cannot avoid moral culpability for bad choices by hiding behind one’s freedom to choose, as if the perceived need for some decision was itself enough to justify any decision made. If we are to ensure that freedom does not degenerate into mere license, then we must recognize that freedom carries with it the imperatives of conscientious consideration of alternatives and personal moral accountability for decisions once made. In the abortion debate, the rhetoric of ‘‘choice’’ obscures, indeed ignores, the primary moral question at hand: Under what circumstances, if any, is the value of prenatal human life outweighed by certain personal considerations of the pregnant woman? This flight by abortion advocates from the central moral question of abortion policy is intentional, for it allows them to persist in using the womb as an asylum from moral responsibility. If the abortion controversy is ever to move toward a sane resolution, then those in favor of abortion on demand will have to think beyond absolutistic and emotive arguments about the imperative of ‘‘choice,’’ and attempt to articulate an authentically moral view of the relative value of personal desire to human fetal life. This they most certainly have not done. Nor are they interested in engaging the moral dimension of abortion policy, for their ‘‘choice’’ argument is much better suited to the propaganda game. The inveterate selfishness of human beings disposes them to embrace any argument that accords them a license for complete selfconcern and self-centeredness. The simplistic and rigid ‘‘My body, my choice’’ formula of the abortion lobby does exactly this, and this is a major reason for its success in the public square. No need to fuss over questions of fetal value and personal responsibility: it’s my body, and I can do with it whatever I want. The main premise used by the pro-abortionists—every woman must be able to completely ‘‘control’’ her own body—yields an airtight abortion on demand conclusion if it is accepted. But, of course, the magnitude

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of its absurdity is so great that it cannot be granted. It is not controlling one’s own body to have an abortion. To do that is to cede control of your body in a most profound and complete way. This is the reality that the pro-choice lobby refuses to accept. When others of us insist that a pregnancy results in another life, another body, a separate human being with a different genetic code from his mother, a different appearance from her, and possibly a different blood type from her, we alter the nature of the syllogism that then must follow, just as certainly as we do when we are talking about the relations between two mature adults. Civilized societies do not permit someone to do what she will with someone else, simply because the doing so requires her only to exercise the force of her own body. Such an understanding is nothing other than ‘‘might makes right’’ barbarism. In a very real sense, the woman’s physical womb is equivalent to the psychological womb in which we all exist in relation to one another.180 Since each of us can assert a certain proprietary claim over our own psyche, we might then extend the abortion argument to say: ‘‘Whatever comes within the reach of my psychological womb ought to be completely subject to my will. Hence, if the existence of another person disturbs me in some way, and I wish to be free of that disturbance—I wish to remove that person from my psychological womb—no one should object to my doing so, because it’s my womb.’’ But we immediately reject the acceptability of eliminating those whose presence we do not desire. Yet, the dominance of the quintessentially modern liberal idea of ‘‘choice’’ is so strong in American culture that many people, especially liberal elites, are unwilling to breathe a word against it. This is the reign of intellectual tyranny presiding over the American public square, mediated to us by the values of contemporary liberalism.

NOTES 1. The most notable exception is the civil rights movement, which even conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan recognized as ‘‘liberalism’s finest hour.’’ Buchanan remarked, ‘‘The liberals paid a heavy price for having championed civil rights in the ’50s and early ’60s, for preaching and advancing the ideal of equality and justice under the law. If they have stumbled and blundered terribly since, they knew what they were doing then, and what they were doing was right.’’ Patrick Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1988), p. 306. For valuable discussion on the civil rights movement and its struggles, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America During the King Years 1954–63, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). See also Christopher Lasch’s social history, The True and Only Heaven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 386–407. 2. In my view Robert Bork has provided the best single-volume explanation.

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See his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), Part I. 3. For description of this normative vision, see William Watkins, The New Absolutes (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1997). The statist habits of contemporary liberalism have produced something of a public backlash as manifested in surging support for libertarian reforms—or elimination—of governmental activity. The recent publication of three popular books vigorously advocating libertarian politics bears this out. See David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (New York: The Free Press, 1997); David Boaz, ed., The Libertarian Reader (New York: The Free Press, 1997); and Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (New York: Broadway Books, 1997). On the utopianism of contemporary liberalism generally, see John O’Sullivan, ‘‘After Reaganism,’’ National Review, April 21, 1997, pp. 56–62, 80. 4. See generally Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1945). 5. For discussion of Mrs. Clinton and the ‘‘politics of meaning,’’ a phrase coined by Michael Lerner, see Michael Kelly, ‘‘Saint Hillary,’’ New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1993. 6. For example, one family physician has written of how she has seen encroaching government and taxation force mothers to work who would have preferred to stay home, and place their children in daycare. See Katherine Dowling, ‘‘The Devalued Family,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1996, p. B9. The contemporary liberal imperative to ‘‘make government work,’’ the ultimate source of this encroachment, is actually counter to central features of the U. S. constitutional system, such as: the system of checks and balances that makes the formation of a majority coalition difficult; the fact that such coalitions by nature require clear and apparent practical benefits from policies; the reality that sweeping governmental policies must nonetheless be implemented at the state level, which makes federal imposition difficult. For elaboration of this argument, and the value of the ‘‘gridlock’’ so despised by utopians, see James Q. Wilson, ‘‘Don’t Bemoan Gridlock—The Constitution Likes It,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1994, p. M1. For discusssion of current cultural trends and their impact on family life, see Dana Mack, The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 7. For the classic contemporary exposition of this principle, see Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society, 2nd. ed. (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996). 8. See Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: William Morrow, 1987), Chapter 2. 9. For trenchant criticism of sixties’ values, and particularly their harmful impact on minorities, see Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass (New York: William Morrow, 1993). 10. ‘‘How the Nation’s Capital Has Crumbled,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1996, p. A1. 11. On this overall idea, see George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). 12. George F. Will, ‘‘The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism,’’ The Public Interest, no. 123, Spring 1996, p. 44.

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13. For discussion of this critical dichotomy, see Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 74–91. 14. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1984). For an excellent discussion of the antireligious work of the ACLU, an organization perhaps most accurately representative of the biases of contemporary liberalism, see the works by William A. Donohue, Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994) and The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1985). 15. Two Methodist professors captured the strong consonance of the religious left with contemporary liberalism by writing, ‘‘[I]t seems inconceivable that any agency of any mainline, Protestant denomination should espouse some social position unlike that of the most liberal Democrats. The church is the dull exponent of conventional secular political ideas with a vaguely religious tint.’’ Thomas C. Reeves, The Empty Church (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 14. Indeed, sometimes liberal religionists outdo their secular compatriots in radicalism. For example, one attendee at a recent American Academy of Religion meeting—a lesbian who was a doctoral student at Chicago Theological Seminary—presented a paper in which she explained her new name for God: ‘‘She who queers.’’ Similarly, at a theater performance for the ‘‘Lesbian-Feminist Issues in Religion Group’’ at this AAR conference, one woman applied the ‘‘Hail Mary’’ prayer to an exclamation of ecstasy in a lesbian sex scene. Examples of such hyper-liberal politicized presentations at professional academic meetings—thinly masked as ‘‘scholarly work’’—could be multiplied many times. For discussion of the AAR meeting just mentioned, see ‘‘Look Who’s Furnishing Our Colleges with Professors!’’ Human Events, March 7, 1997, pp. 16–17. See also, generally, Paul Mankowski, ‘‘What I Saw at the American Academy of Religion,’’ First Things, no. 21, March 1992, pp. 36–41. For a thorough discussion of the religious left and its coherence with the general liberal project of today—and its consequential decline in membership and vitality—see Reeves’s book. For a defense of liberal religion, Christianity in particular, see Donald E. Miller, The Case for Liberal Christianity (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981). For an important discussion on the acculturation of religious bodies, see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), Chapter 3. One consequence of widespread religious acculturation is the cultural disparaging of behavioral limits and traditional norms, especially with regard to sexual life. This is simply because the moral demands of traditional Judeo-Christian religion tend to impinge most acutely on human sexuality. So then what happens to a culture when all limits on individual behavior, particularly sexual, are removed? Today’s liberalism says people become more free and uninhibited, and therefore happier. Critics of contemporary liberalism argue that personal liberty, in any context, disconnected from moral absolutes and transcendent values actually degrades the scope and quality of human freedom, and ultimately hurts our society by debasing human dignity. Almost always such critics are dismissed by liberal politicians and media mavens as ‘‘intolerant bigots’’ or ‘‘right wing extremists.’’ But what would our public life be like if truly all boundaries on personal conduct were erased? On May 3rd, 1997, courtesy of the wise city leaders of San Francisco—the

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proud capital of contemporary liberalism—we received a glimpse of this liberal utopia, and it was not pretty. This preview was possible because friends of Jack Davis, a powerful San Francisco political consultant, threw him a fiftieth birthday celebration attended by the liberal political elite of the city, including Mayor Willie Brown, city supervisors and many other municipal officials. But at this San Francisco birthday party they did not play ‘‘Twister.’’ No, there were both male and female strippers dancing at this gathering, as well as live and simulated sex acts openly performed on a stage throughout the night. The bacchanalia concluded with a ‘‘dominatrix’’ beating a man in front of the crowd, urinating on him in full view of the audience, and carving a satanic symbol—a pentagram—into the man’s bare back with a knife. Finally, the man was publicly sodomized with a whiskey bottle. Reportedly, some in attendance walked out in disgust, many did not. One of those who fled in shock was Barbara Kaufman, President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who was seen leaving during the mutilation of the man, moaning ‘‘gross . . . gross’’ (‘‘Davis’ Big Birthday Bash Turns Heads (And Some Stomachs),’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1997, p. A13). Some other city leaders remained, watching uncomfortably. San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey was among them. He said, ‘‘It was like walking into a Mapplethorpe exhibit. It was so disgusting, I thought it was funded by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts)’’ (‘‘Davis’ Big Birthday Bash Turns Heads (And Some Stomachs),’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1997, p.A13). The man in whose back the pentagram was carved is Steven Johnson Leyba, an ‘‘ordained’’ priest in the San Francisco-based Church of Satan. He also leads a performance group called The United Satanic Apache Front, which Leyba— who is one-quarter Apache—says has performed this same bizarre act at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of New Mexico. The ritual, which Leyba calls the ‘‘Apache Whiskey Rite,’’ is intended, he says, to be a ‘‘literal metaphor for how alcohol was forced on my [Apache] people’’ (‘‘Davis Party Performer Says He’s Satanic Priest,’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 1997, p.A19). Mayor Brown himself, whose 1995 mayoral campaign was managed by Jack Davis, left before the bloodletting of Leyba to attend another commitment. But the Mayor was not critical of Davis, later telling reporters, ‘‘I don’t know who he owes an apology to’’ (‘‘49ers Bring Campaign to Chinatown,’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 1997, p. A17). Brown himself received a similar free pass from the San Francisco press for his association with the lurid event. Imagine how differently Clarence Thomas or Ward Connerly would have been treated by journalists had they been present at such an obscene party. In the wake of the city fathers’ night of debauchery, local newspapers and talk shows were abuzz with the angry voices of citizens deriding arrogant cityinsiders who flout what, outside of San Francisco, are considered common norms of behavior and who think they can get away with anything. Local restaurant owner Ed Moose expressed the frustration of some city residents, saying ‘‘We’ve come a long way in showing San Francisco as a sane, exciting place to live and raise a family. Now, once again, the country and really the whole world will say this place appears to be so far out of the mainstream. The people of this city

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deserve better, and that’s why I’m so angry’’ (‘‘Party Talk Won’t Die Down,’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1997, p. A19). All of this outrage was much ado about nothing as far as the liberal leaders of San Francisco were concerned. To them, the night’s events were little more than a faux pas; actions that were impolitic in a public setting but certainly not wrong in and of themselves. After all, people should be able to do whatever they want, right? It is this patent indifference to the moral quality and consequences of human behavior that is one of the most socially corrosive elements of modern liberalism, and the reason why, outside the elite corridors of liberal social and political power, citizens are in revolt against the libertine and hyper-permissive personal ethic of the Left. They know that there are some lines of conduct that should not be crossed, and that absolute freedom inevitably devours itself, binding people with the cords of their own vices. Significantly, in the wake of his now infamous party, Jack Davis has experienced a spiritual crisis of sorts, attending church for the first time in 25 years, and resolving to quit his contentious political consulting career and the wild streets of San Francisco, moving to Sedona, Arizona. See ‘‘A Political Bad Boy’s Lament,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1997, p. A1. For a full recounting of Davis’s party and its political context, see Brad Stetson, ‘‘The Limits of Tolerance,’’ World, June 14/21, 1997, p. 19. 16. A 1994 CNN/USA Today Gallup Poll found that 70 percent of Americans belonged to a church or synagogue, and 66 percent said they attended religious services once a month. Overall, there has been a significant growth in national religious involvement since World War II. See Reeves, The Empty Church, pp. 51– 54, 125–127. Also see Dean Kelly’s classic study of the rapid growth of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian churches featuring—in contradistinction to their liberal counterparts—literalistic belief systems and high demands of personal commitment from their members. See Dean Kelly, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in the Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 17. See William R. Mattox, Jr., ‘‘Sleep with Your Spouse, Live Longer,’’ The Orange County Register, January 23, 1997, p. Metro 9. Studies are also being conducted on the putative practical benefits of prayer. 18. For recent, comprehensive discussion, see David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 19. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. by F. J. Sheed, Books I-X (Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1970), p. 51. 20. An abbreviated version of this vignette appears as ‘‘What Miles Taught,’’ in World, October 12, 1996, p. 26. 21. Marvin Olasky, a conservative Christian journalist, is a notable exception to this trend. His The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing , 1992) became very influential in deliberations about the reformation of welfare alternatives. Newt Gingrich’s mention of Olasky’s book in his inaugural speech to Congress as Speaker of the House of Representatives contributed significantly to that notoriety. 22. Media bias and the leftward predilections of media elites is well docu-

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mented. For good reason, as seen in the profoundly liberal inclination of journalists revealed in the 1992 presidential election: 89 percent of them voted for Bill Clinton (Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 339). Of course, media workers are clearly inclined to support feminist causes, too; see John Leo, ‘‘Things that go bump in the home,’’ U.S. News and World Report, May 13, 1996, p. 25. On media bias and religion specifically, see Fred Barnes, ‘‘Faithful Bigots,’’ Forbes Media Critic, 1, no. 2, 1994. See also Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw’s seminal study of pro-choice media bias, ‘‘Abortion Bias Sweeps into News,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1990, p. 10f. On the liberal inclinations of major media generally, see L. Brent Bozell and Brent H. Baker, eds., And That’s the Way It Is(n’t): A Reference Guide to Media Bias (Alexandria, Va.: Media Research Center, 1990), and Michael Medved, Hollywood Vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 23. Brad Stetson, interview with Patrick Robertson and CityTeam program participants, September 6, 1995. CityTeam’s address is 2302 Zanker Road, San Jose, CA 95131–1137. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. Steven is a pseudonym. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. Ray is a pseudonym. 29. Ibid. Hakim is a pseudonym. 30. Brad Stetson, interview with San Jose Housing Department official, September 6, 1995. 31. Stetson, interview with Patrick Robertson, September 6, 1995. 32. Brad Stetson, interview with Patrick Robertson, February 5, 1997. 33. Ibid. 34. On the value of prophetic religious critique of society and social structures, see Stephen Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), Part II; Os Guiness, The American Hour (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Lynn Buzzard and Paula Campbell, Holy Disobedience (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1984); and, classically, Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (London: SCM Press edition, 1963) and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Meridian Books edition, 1956). 35. See Dallas Willard, ‘‘Language, Being, God and the Three Stages of Theistic Evidence,’’ in J. P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen, eds., Does God Exist?: The Great Debate (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990), pp. 197–221 for an unusual and careful statement of the logical case for theism. 36. For a general description of Promise Keepers, see ‘‘The Power of a Promise Keeper,’’ Good News, September/October 1995, pp. 12–17; Joe Maxwell, ‘‘Promise Keepers’ Parachurch Paradigm,’’ World, March 2, 1996. For a critical, but well-balanced, discussion of the movement, see Donna Minkowitz, ‘‘In the Name of the Father,’’ Ms. November/December 1995, pp. 64–71. Reporter Minkowitz lied to Promise Keepers’ administrators about her gender and dressed up as a man to gain admission to a Promise Keepers’ event, as the conferences are by design male-only. In the course of the two-day event, she needed to use the bathroom. As even the women’s restrooms were being used by the men, she went ahead and used one of those, hurrying into a stall. Apparently, the men’s

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right to privacy—an absolute and inviolable value for feminists like Ms. Minkowitz—was not important enough to be observed by her. 37. See Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 293–294, 336. 38. On gender differentiation, see the academic work of sociologist Stephen Goldberg, Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1993) and the popular work of John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Perhaps reflection on the recent controversy over the admission of women into The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute would help clarify the case for understanding men and women differently—a position accorded prima facie reasonableness before feminism’s utopian fantasies and goal of radical social transformation became institutionalized in contemporary American society. I maintain that Ms. Faulkner’s wealthy feminist sponsors—who ecstatically cheered her when she spoke at a National Organization for Women’s rally just a few weeks before her entry into The Citadel—based their argument for her admission on a remarkably shallow understanding of men, women, and human society. Foremost among their confusions was the unreflective claim that gender segregation is morally equivalent to racial segregation. But unlike different racial groups, men and women have genuine intrinsic differences in aptitudes (men tend toward the technical, women tend toward the expressive) and psychology (men tend to emphasize rules and fairness, women tend to emphasize relationships and empathy). These qualitative differences have implications for the structure of collegiate education, and so gender segregation in such a context is morally justified and a reasonable option to preserve. The state of South Carolina recognizes as much and so provides public funds for The Citadel—as well as for the two all-female colleges in that state, Columbia and Converse. But those who used Ms. Faulkner as a stalking horse in their war against tradition conveniently omitted mention of this equitable funding. The political point of ‘‘women’s oppression’’ was too important to be contradicted by the facts. Indeed, while the anticipated demise of The Citadel’s 152-year practice of single-gender education was being hailed by feminists as an exhilarating breakthrough in gender equality, they gave little thought to the possibility that an all-male college like The Citadel is a valuable educational alternative for American society, and one very much worth preserving. Today there are just four all-male colleges—if one counts VMI and The Citadel—left in this country, compared with eighty-three all-female institutions. This massive disparity in educational options for young males is surely ill-advised at a time when adult men are abandoning responsible masculinity. This abandonment is in significant part attributable to a pervasive, cultural lack of clarity concerning what authentic masculinity means and how ‘‘real’’ men ought to behave. While the amelioration of such massive social pathologies must be broad based, strong subcultures of masculinity—such as that found at a place like The Citadel—which emphasize the simple values of self-responsibility, intellectual diligence, integrity, and sexual restraint can, in part, compensate for the socialization into sound masculinity that is so lacking in contemporary American life. Social anthropologists have long recognized that no society can survive unless it successfully socializes males away from violence and sexual predation. When families, the locus of socialization, fail at this task (as so many fragmented fam-

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ilies today do), the practical and symbolic role of schools such as The Citadel looms large. This is because institutions like The Citadel form male character in a unique and socially beneficial way. Women, because of their common ‘‘experience of the body,’’ have a modicum of a natural camaraderie and empathy among themselves that men usually lack. The sometimes profound psychological and somatic tribulations of menstruation and pregnancy give women a base of commonality that familiarizes them with one another. I remember noticing a subtle but unmistakable sense of connectedness in the maternity ward at the hospital where my wife gave birth to our daughter. The women there, although they did not know each other, comfortably interacted under an easy canopy of familiarity. For men, however, camaraderie—and the resulting affection—is more synthetic and is primarily a product of their experience together, in the context of a cooperative effort such as sports or work wherein they earn one another’s respect. This camaraderie has a civilizing effect on men. It allows them to form bonds that temper their drive to dominate and to derive through their experience in a male culture a critically important self-confidence in their own masculinity. This selfconfidence reduces the likelihood that a man will try to prove his virility through violence—particularly against women—or through sexual promiscuity. Tragically, such a misguided pseudomasculinity, and the suffocatingly brutal culture that it engenders, is the norm today, particularly in our inner cities, which is why from Los Angeles to Milwaukee to New York community leaders are working to establish all-male private schools for their youth. Unfortunately for the American commonweal, the politically powerful feminist supporters of Shannon Faulkner are blind to the social usefulness of models of genuine masculinity. They reflexively pursue the feminizing of any all-male institution or culture without considering the consequences to the larger society. During this age of social engineering and relentless interest group politics, it has been forgotten that in our radically pluralistic society everyone’s interests are perforce united. It is not possible to separate what is good for women from what is good for men—and what is in the best long-term interests of the nation as a whole. For an extended discussion on the topic of integrating women into allmale military colleges such as The Citadel and VMI, see Geoffrey Norman, ‘‘Crashing VMI’s Line,’’ The American Spectator, December 1996, pp. 34–41; and John McGinnis, ‘‘Harassment at VMI,’’ The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 1996, p. A18. For discussion of the little reported reality that females in the military also commit sexual harassment—suggesting the behavior is a function of simply men and women being around each other, rather than the male ethic of misogyny at work—see ‘‘Bomber Pilot Charged with Sexual Misconduct,’’ Human Events, March 7, 1997, p. 5. 39. Richard Louv, ‘‘What Do Mothers Really Want?’’ Parents, May 1996, pp. 38–42. 40. Quoted in Olivia Vlahos, ‘‘The Herstory of Warfare,’’ The Women’s Quarterly, no. 5, Autumn 1995. 41. David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 1. 42. William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 46.

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43. Ibid., p. 30. 44. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 82. 45. On feelings of crisis and chaos among baby boomers, and survey data on the church attendance patterns of baby boomers and youth, see Reeves, The Empty Church, pp. 170–171. 46. This can be verified by the California Angels Baseball Club business office in Anaheim, California. 47. On this point, see generally, Kelly, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing; Reeves, The Empty Church; James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983); and George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 48. Most importantly, Kelly, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. 49. A notable exception to this rightward lean are evangelical liberals, typified by Ronald Sider. See his Completely Pro-Life: Building a Consistent Stance (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1987) for representative discussion. 50. For discussion on this, see Dennis Prager, ‘‘Black Candidates and White Voters,’’ The Prager Perspective, December 15, 1996, p. 4. 51. Yet, obviously the swelling opposition to affirmative action is implausibly accounted for by such claims. Unquestionably, with the decision of the regents of the University of California to end affirmative action in university admissions and hiring, and with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down affirmative action admissions practices at the University of Texas Law School, affirmative action—as currently practiced—is straining the patience of a wide spectrum of fair-minded Americans. On the decline of general public support for present policies of affirmative action, see Thomas Sowell, ‘‘The Twilight of Affirmative Action,’’ The Orange County Register, April 5, 1996, p. Metro 7; Terry Eastland, ‘‘Endgame for Affirmative Action,’’ The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1996. For two comprehensive recent critiques of affirmative action, see Terry Eastland, Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1996); and Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1995). 52. Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 268. 53. For development of this idea, see, generally, Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 54. For example, Reinhold Niebuhr’s influential understanding would not be countenanced by the contemporary liberal commitment to hyper-individualism and the proliferation of personal rights: ‘‘From the perspective of society the highest moral ideal is justice. From the perspective of the individual the highest ideal is unselfishness. Society must strive for justice even if it is forced to use means, such as self-assertion [and] coercion . . . which cannot gain the sanction of the most sensitive moral spirit’’ (Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 257). For classically insightful discussions of the relationship of justice and mercy, see Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Chapter 10. 55. ‘‘When Kids Do the Unspeakable,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1996, p. B8. Emphasis added.

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56. The American Spectator, July 1996, p. 85. 57. Dennis Prager, ‘‘The Credos of Our Faiths,’’ The Prager Perspective, July 15, 1996, p. 4. 58. Ibid. 59. On the nature of homosexuality as volitional, see, for example, Charles Socarides et al., ‘‘Don’t Forsake Homosexuals Who Want Help,’’ The Wall Street Journal, January 9, 1997, p. A10. 60. This paradox is often overlooked by liberals—for example, those who seek to defend black racism on the grounds that blacks, as disempowered, cannot be racist. For discussion of this question, see John Blake, ‘‘Can a Black Person Be a Racist?,’’ The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 20, 1994, p. P1. For general discussion of black racism, which is probably the most underreported story in America, see David Horowitz, ’’ Identifying Black Racism: The Last Taboo,’’ The Orange County Register, December 10, 1995, p. Commentary 3; ‘‘Racial Strife Permeates School Scrap,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1997, p. A5; Dinesh D’Souza, ‘‘Bigotry in Black and White: Can African Americans Be Racist?’’ in his book The End of Racism (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 387– 429); and Jared Taylor, Paved with Good Intentions (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1992), pp. 64–73, 233–240, 256–260. 61. I say minority communities in particular because the out-of-wedlock birthrate for all minorities at the turn of the century is expected to be 80 percent, compared to 40 percent nationally (Bennett, DiIulio, and Walter, Body Count, p. 196). For black Americans nationally, the out-of-wedlock birthrate is currently more than 70 percent (Body Count, p. 196). The social destruction wrought by out-of-wedlock births—and the single-parent families they create—is so well documented that it is almost unnecessary to remark about it. Barbara Whitehead’s article in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1993, ‘‘Dan Quayle Was Right,’’ is a standard general source. As Whitehead remarks at the outset of her article, ‘‘Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. . . . [They] are two to three times as likely as children in twoparent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.’’ Also see Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Chapter 9; Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, esp. pp. 45–48; Charles Murray, ‘‘The Coming White Underclass,’’ The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 1995, p. A14. On reasons for the rise in out-of-wedlock births, see John J. Dilulio, Jr., ‘‘Bring Back Shotgun Weddings,’’ The Weekly Standard, October 21, 1996. 62. See Jean Lloyd, ‘‘Sacrificing Kids on the Altar of Equality,’’ The Wall Street Journal, August 7, 1996. 63. See ‘‘Teens Arrested in Torture of Classmate,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1996, p. A23. 64. See the article by Sarah Luck Pearson illustrating these trends: ‘‘Hollywood High Confidential,’’ in L.A. Weekly, May 3–May 9, 1996. According to William J. Bennett, 20 percent of high school students in the country now carry a firearm, knife, razor, or other weapon to school with them regularly. See Bennett, Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, p. 30.

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65. Bennett, Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, p. 30. 66. See John J. DiIulio’s remark, cited in ibid., p. 37. DiIulio includes conservative as well as liberal elites in this indictment. That is true enough, but clearly it is the modern liberal injunction to be ‘‘tolerant,’’ ‘‘compassionate,’’ and understanding of social forces driving individual behavior which is the primary source of the reluctance to punish crime, especially juvenile crime. 67. See Richard J. Gelles, The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Childrens’ Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Kathleen Schormann, ‘‘The Anniversary of a Death Foretold,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1996, p. B11. For an excellent and powerful argument against the practice of emphasizing biological over nonbiological relationships, see Dennis Prager, ‘‘Blood Versus Love,’’ Ultimate Issues 11, no. 2 (1995). See also ‘‘The Ongoing Destruction of a Boy Named Danny,’’ The Prager Perspective, February 1, 1997, p. 3. 68. This discussion of tolerance as a concept is based on a similar discussion in Brad Stetson, Pluralism and Particularity in Religious Belief (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1994), pp. 73–76. 69. Maurice Cranston,‘‘Toleration,’’ in Paul Johnson, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 143. 70. See J. Budziszewski, True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgment (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992), Part One and Part Two, for helpful discussion of the meaning of authentic tolerance and exposition of prevalent contemporary misunderstandings of tolerance. 71. See the seminal study of Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 72. For a clear, popular analysis of the practical and philosophical problems entailed in elevating freedom to an absolute, supreme value, see Richard John Neuhaus’s explanation of Veritatis Splendor, in The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 1993, p. A12. A consequence of this ethical impotence—as well as of the current advocacy of ‘‘diversity’’ and ‘‘multiculturalism’’—is the pervasive and enduring acceptance of cultural relativism. But plainly, cultural practices are not wholly value neutral or sui generis. For a classic practical example of cultural arbitration, see the account of the British decision to outlaw the Hindu practice of suttee, in Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 157–158. For a comprehensive critical analysis of multiculturalism as an ideology, see Alvin Schmidt, The Menace of Multiculturalism: Trojan Horse in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1997). 73. Frederick R. Lynch, The Diversity Machine (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 117. 74. ‘‘Archbishop Challenges S. F. Domestic Partners Law,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1997, p. A3. 75. See the story of Ron Greer’s plight in Roy Maynard, ‘‘Zero Tolerance,’’ World, March 22, 1997, pp. 13–16. On the very real rise in persecution of Christians internationally, see Nina Shea, ‘‘Oppression of Christians Is Ignored,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1997, p. B9. On the Clinton administration’s deliberate inattention to the international persecution of Christians, see Tom Bethell, ‘‘Saving Faith at State,’’ The American Spectator, April 1997, pp. 20–21. See also Nina

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Shea’s important book, In the Lion’s Den (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 1997). 76. Dennis Prager, ‘‘Judaism, Gay Rabbis and the Difficulty of Dialogue,’’ The Prager Perspective, November 15, 1996. This issue contains Prager’s original essay published in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, the critical rabbi’s letter, and Prager’s response to the rabbi’s letter. 77. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 200. 78. S. D. Gaede, When Tolerance Is No Virtue (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 22. 79. Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: Vintage Books edition, 1992), p. 170. 80. See Nat Hentoff, ‘‘Pro-Choice Bigots,’’ The New Republic, November 30, 1992. Reprinted in The Human Life Review 19, no.1 (Winter 1993): 21. For a catalog of the regular snubs and stony silence accorded pro-life Democrats by their party’s powerful, see Fred Barnes, ‘‘Pro-Life Democrats,’’ The Weekly Standard, September 9, 1996, p. 15. 81. Quoted in Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 204. 82. Schmidt, The Menace of Multiculturalism, p. 94. 83. For interesting reflections on trends in conservative thought, see the symposium, ‘‘On the Future of Conservatism,’’ Commentary, February 1997. 84. Richard John Neuhaus, ‘‘Second Thoughts,’’ in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, eds., Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1989), p. 9. Quoted in Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 336. 85. See Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 86. For a comprehensive analysis of the managing diversity movement, see Lynch, The Diversity Machine. 87. Ironically, despite high sensitivity to racial oppression in this country, the well-documented slavery of blacks within Africa has not attracted the concern of civil rights organizations here. See Joseph R. Gregory, ‘‘African Slavery 1996,’’ First Things, May 1996, pp. 37–39; Jeff Jacoby, ‘‘Civil Rights Groups Yawn at African Slavery,’’ The Orange County Register, April 4, 1996, p. Metro 9; Thomas Sowell, ‘‘Some Hidden Truths in Black History Month,’’ The Orange County Register, February 18, 1997, p. Metro 9, and Sowell, ‘‘Where Is Outrage about Blackon-Black Slavery?’’ Human Events, March 7, 1997, p. 14; David Aikman, ‘‘Slavery in Our Time,’’ The American Spectator, February 1997, pp. 52–53. On the genocidal destruction of African life by Africans and the lukewarm response of American civil rights groups, see Keith B. Richburg, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a discussion of black anger and the major media’s role in fomenting that anger, see the insightful discussion by Dennis Prager, ‘‘The Media Distorted the Racial Divide over the Simpson Verdicts,’’ in The Prager Perspective, February 15, 1997. On black rage and black racism generally, see Peter Collier and David Horowitz, eds., The Race Card (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1977). 88. D’Souza, The End of Racism, p. 5. 89. Ibid.

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90. ‘‘Jackson Sees Clinton ‘Flaw’ in Rapper Attack,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1992. 91. D’Souza, The End of Racism, p. 5 92. Lynch, The Diversity Machine, p. 117. 93. D’Souza, The End of Racism, p. 404. On February 10, 1997, a federal jury found Lemrick Nelson guilty of violating Yankel Rosenbaum’s civil rights for the killing. For that offense he faces six to twenty years in prison under sentencing guidelines. See ‘‘Black Guilty in Civil-Rights Trial over Jewish Scholar Slain in Riot,’’ The Orange County Register, February 11, 1997, p. News 20. 94. A. S. Doc Young, ‘‘Negatives and Positives,’’ Los Angeles Sentinel, November 14, 1991. 95. ‘‘Official: Williams’ Firing a ‘Lynching’,’’ The Orange County Register, March 13, 1997, p. News 4. 96. ‘‘Reggie White Says Police, Conspiracies Pose Problem,’’ Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1997, p. C2. 97. See the comprehensive survey in The New Yorker, April 29 and May 6, 1996, double issue. 98. Prager, ‘‘Black Candidates and White Voters,’’ p. 4. 99. Quoted in D’Souza, The End of Racism, p. 6. See Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 100. Quoted in Joseph G. Conti and Brad Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment: Profiles of a New Black Vanguard (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1993), p. 43. See also Walter Williams, ‘‘We Hold Black Rioters to a Lesser Standard,’’ Orange Country Register, May 20, 1992. 101. ‘‘The Lure of Excuses,’’ Newsweek, July 29, 1991, p. 27. 102. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 229. And, of course, the fantastic police conspiracy to frame O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman was widely believed in black America. For conclusive debunking of the possibility, see the comprehensive discussions of the case by Vincent Bugliosi, Outrage (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) and Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of His Life (New York: Random House, 1996). 103. See Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 45. 104. On jury nullification, and one law professor’s advocacy of it, see the important article ‘‘Race Seems to Play an Increasing Role in Many Jury Verdicts,’’ The Wall Street Journal, October 4, 1995, p. A1. See also Deroy Murdock, ‘‘Are America’s Juries Race Obsessed?’’ in Stan Faryna, Brad Stetson, and Joseph G. Conti, eds., Black and Right: The Bold New Voice of Black Conservatives in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1997). The extent to which crime has ravaged black communities is seldom discussed out of fear of being called ‘‘racist’’ if the discussant is white or ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ if he is black. For statistical information on crime in black communities, see Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, pp. 22–23, 45, 67, 78. Obviously, high crime rates bring myriad terrible consequences for the long-term quality of life for blacks, including community isolation from the larger society. One recent study concluded that 14 percent of black men are currently or permanently barred from voting either because they are in prison or because they have been convicted of a felony. See ‘‘Study Says 14% of

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Black Men are Disenfranchised,’’ The Orange County Register, January 31, 1997, p. Metro 18. 105. See Shelby Steele, ‘‘The New Sovereignty,’’ Harper’s, July 1992, pp. 47–54. 106. This is not to imply there is no residual anti-black bigotry; rather, race merchants exaggerate its prevalence and power. Indeed, race-based crimes against black Americans persist. For one example, see ‘‘Song on Race Murder Played in Soldier’s Trial,’’ The Orange County Register, February 13, 1997, p. News 31. 107. See the account of Sally Satel, ‘‘Psychiatric Apartheid,’’ The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1986, p. A14. 108. ‘‘Wage Gap May Be Part of the Cost of ‘Ebonics’,’’ The Orange County Register, January 26, 1997, p. News 18. 109. See Eldridge Cleaver’s op-ed essay, ‘‘We Need to Rescue Kids from Ebonics,’’ Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1997. 110. Regarding higher education, see D’Souza’s many accounts in Illiberal Education; and Nat Hentoff, ‘‘Campus Diversity Too Often Fosters Separatism,’’ The Orange County Register, April 28, 1996, p. Commentary 3. Concerning the corrosive effect of celebrations of ethnic pride on high school campuses, see ‘‘Do School Ethnic Clubs Unify or Divide?’’ Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1996, p. A1; and ‘‘More Students Question Need to State Race,’’ The Orange County Register, May 5, 1996, p. News 14. 111. John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham, ‘‘Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the ‘‘Burden of ‘Acting White’,’’ The Urban Review 18, no. 3, 176–206. 112. ‘‘The Hidden Hurdle,’’ Time, March 16, 1992, p. 44. 113. Conti and Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment, p. 159. Portions of the foregoing discussion of the Ogbu and Fordham study were drawn from Conti and Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment. 114. See the discussion by Dennis Prager, ‘‘Texaco Doesn’t Celebrate Chanukah—So What?’’ in The Prager Perspective, January 15, 1997, p. 3. See also the analysis of Walter Olson, ‘‘Framing Texaco,’’ The American Spectator, February 1997, pp. 49–51. 115. ‘‘Few Church Fires Linked to Racism,’’ The Orange County Register, July 5, 1996, p. News 22. 116. Michael Fumento, ‘‘A Church Arson Epidemic? It’s Smoke and Mirrors,’’ The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1996. 117. See John Leo, ‘‘A Great Story Never Told,’’ U. S. News and World Report, December 2, 1996. On the political advantage gained by several liberal interest groups and politicians because of reporting on this issue, see Michael Fumento, ‘‘Who’s Fanning the Flames of Racism?’’ The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 1997, p. A12. 118. See Walter Williams, ‘‘ ‘Mortgage Racism’ Study Is Proved a Fraud,’’ The Orange County Register, June 12, 1996, p. Metro 7. See Jared Taylor, Paved with Good Intentions (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1992), pp. 57–58, and, more importantly, D’Souza, The End of Racism, pp. 279–282. 119. ‘‘A Lesson in Civility from Jesse Jackson and Friends,’’ Human Events, February 21, 1997, p. 3. 120. Ibid.

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121. For discussion, see ‘‘Black Leaders Try to Deny Thomas Status as Role Model,’’ The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 1997, p. A20. 122. For details on Mr. Elder’s background, which includes a law degree and legal practice, see the interview with him in Reason, April 1996, pp. 44–50. 123. Quoted in Conti and Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment, p. 182. 124. Brad Stetson, interview with Jesse Peterson, February 15, 1997. Mr. Peterson’s organization, BOND, can be reached at P. O. Box 86253 Los Angeles, Calif. 90086—0253. 125. Quoted in Patrick Buchanan, ‘‘Christians, Nazis and Jesse Jackson,’’ Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1994, p. B7. 126. Still, in the face of such calumny, there are a growing number of black dissidents, with journals of opinion devoted to allowing them a forum to speak, something all but denied in the mainstream black press. Publications produced by black dissidents include The Lincoln Review, Destiny, Urban Family, Issues and Views, and Headway. On this phenomenon, see Jason L. Riley, ‘‘Black Conservatives Take to the Presses,’’ The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1995. 127. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, reprinted), p. 89. Quoted in Schmidt, The Menace of Multiculturalism, p. 27. Of course, the life of one-time slave turned man of letters and profound erudition, Frederick Douglass, is a classic example of the freedom and color-blindness of the mind. For a fine mini-biography of Douglass, and an analysis of his political and economic thought, see Jim Powell, ‘‘Frederick Douglass—Heroic Orator for Liberty,’’ The Freeman, February 1997, pp. 98–108. 128. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994). For critical discussion, see Russel Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, The Bell Curve Debate (New York, Times Books, 1995). 129. Social silence is distinct from Timur Kuran’s aforementioned ‘‘preference falsification’’ in that it inhibits discussion, whereas preference falsification leads people to misrepresent their views. As with preference falsification, however, the force of social silence effectively directs people to those attitudes that are laudable and deemed popularly reasonable. In this way, social silence conditions public sentiment, since the publicly accepted norms of opinion in a given social context significantly affect the opinions people choose to hold. For full explanations of the psychological and sociological dynamics of this effect, which Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann calls the ‘‘spiral of silence,’’ see her article ‘‘The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion,’’ Journal of Communication 24 (Spring 1974): 43–51 and her book, The Spiral of Silence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For representative discussion of this phenomenon at work in public considerations of other controversial issues, such as affirmative action and racial politics, see Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and Crisis of Affirmative Action (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991) and Conti and Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment. 130. Indeed, the link between illegitimacy and welfare is indisputable and potent, as is the immense social destructiveness of these two realities. See, for example, the symposium ‘‘Illegitimacy and Welfare,’’ in Social Science and Modern Society, July/August 1996. I am indebted to Joseph G. Conti for his assistance with this discussion of Public Truth.

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131. Cecil Murray, quoted in Nina J. Easton, ‘‘Rev. Murray’s Gospel of Action,’’ Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 16, 1992. 132. While some states, like California, have had a measure of success attacking governmental race- and gender-based policies through ballot initiatives, this success has not translated into broad practical change, and the vast universe of nongovernmental race- and gender-based policies remains untouched, both in California and elsewhere. Reform on such a wider scale awaits much greater reservoirs of public capital. Regarding partial-birth abortion, at this writing President Clinton is, for the second time, considering a proposed congressional ban on partial-birth abortions. As with the first such congressional ban, which Clinton vetoed, the Senate lacks the votes needed to override Clinton’s expected repeat veto. 133. On the lack of vigorous conservative opposition to the liberal transformation of American society, see Tom Bethell, ‘‘Losing the War,’’ The American Spectator, February 1997, pp. 20–21. 134. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, p. 27. 135. See Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, p. 22. 136. Glenn Loury, ‘‘The Impossible Dilemma,’’ The New Republic, January 1, 1996, quoted in Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, p. 22. 137. For a personal account of the trauma to a family caused by the murder of a loved one, see His Name Is Ron by the family of Ronald Goldman (New York: William Morrow, 1997). 138. See Kristen Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) for discussion on this point. 139. See Richard John Neuhaus, ‘‘Bloody-Minded Compassion,’’ First Things, no. 40, February 1994, pp. 48–50 for a discussion of the parameters of legitimate pro-life protest. 140. See Lynn Buzzard and Paula Campbell, Holy Disobedience (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1984) for an exposition of their respective ideas on nonviolent protest. 141. On Naomi Wolf, see her article, ‘‘Our Bodies, Our Souls,’’ The New Republic, October 16, 1995, and Naomi Wolf et al., ‘‘Our Bodies, Our Souls: A Symposium,’’ the Human Life Review (Winter 1996). See also ‘‘A Decision Between a Woman and God,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1996, p. E1. On Norma McCorvey, see ‘‘ ‘Jane Roe’ Joins Operation Rescue,’’ August 11, 1995, p. News 3. 142. See Marvin Olasky, ‘‘Anti-abortion Movement’s Future,’’ The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1995, p. A14. For further discussion on the pro-life movement’s future, see Richard Samuelson, ‘‘How the Party of Lincoln Can Win on Abortion,’’ The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 1996, p. A10. 143. See Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) for an explanation of the development and permissiveness of American abortion law, especially with regard to the positions of other Western democracies on this subject. 144. On reasons commonly given for the decision to abort, see appendices B though G to Frederica Mathewes-Green, Real Choices: Offering Practical, LifeAffirming Alternatives to Abortion (Sisters, Oreg.: Questar Publishing, 1994). 145. ‘‘Driver Sentenced to 16 Years in Death of Premature Baby,’’ The Orange County Register, October 22, 1996, p. News 17.

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146. ‘‘Attempted Homicide Alleged in Fetal Intoxication Case,’’ USA Today, September 6, 1996, p. 8A. 147. ‘‘Woman Who Shot Herself Is Charged in Fetus’ Death,’’ Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1994, p. A34. 148. ‘‘Fetus to Get Surgery for Birth Defect,’’ Santa Barbara News Press, September 9, 1993, p. A1. 149. Susan Carpenter McMillan, ‘‘. . . While in California, a Court Affirms the Humanity of a Fetus,’’ Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1994, p. B11. 150. ‘‘Murder Charge Is Rejected in Drug-Related Stillbirth,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1992, p. A13. 151. See ‘‘Pregnancy Negligence Not Prosecuted,’’ The Orange County Register, August 11, 1996, p. Metro 7. For an excellent examination of the current configuration of legal protections for the unborn and fetal homicide laws, see the cover story, ‘‘Rights of the Unborn,’’ USA Today, December 12, 1996. 152. For general discussion of euthanasia, see Ezekiel J. Emanuel, ‘‘The Painful Truth about Euthanasia,’’ The Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1997, p. A18; David C. Thomasma, ‘‘Euthanasia as Power and Empowerment,’’ in Robert H. Blank and Andrea L. Bonnicksen, eds., Medicine Unbound: The Human Body and the Limits of Medical Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Nigel M. de S. Cameron, The New Medicine (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1991), pp. 129– 144; Carlos Gomez, Regulating Death: Euthanasia and the Case of the Netherlands (New York: The Free Press, 1991); and Beth Spring and Ed Larson, Euthanasia: Spiritual, Medical and Legal Issues in Terminal Health Care (Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah Press, 1988). 153. The intellectual and rhetorical means by which this understanding has become a reality was concisely described in a very prescient editorial in the journal California Medicine (September 1970): ‘‘Since the old ethic [respecting human life] has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not put forth under socially impeccable auspices.’’ Emphasis added. 154. Many more such questions could be asked. For discussion of the human being as a substance and not as a property-thing, and for discussion on the personhood of the unborn, see John A. Mitchell and Scott B. Rae, ‘‘The Moral Status of Fetuses and Embryos,’’ in Brad Stetson, ed., The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996) and Scott B. Rae, Brave New Families (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1996), pp. 90–108. 155. On the activities of pro-life feminists, see ‘‘Feminists for Life Keys on Prevention, Not Abortion,’’ Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1996, p. A5. 156. For detailed statements from women who have aborted, and for an analysis of the psycho-emotional sequelae they often experience, see David Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No More (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987).

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157. Nat Hentoff, ‘‘No Limit on ‘Choice?’ Here’s the Ugly Result,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1993. 158. See Kate O’Beirne’s description in National Review, May 6, 1996, p. 24. See also the editorial ‘‘Partial Birth Politics’’ in The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1996, p. A18; ‘‘On Partial Birth Abortion,’’ The Weekly Standard, April 29, 1996, p. 9; and Helen Alvare, ‘‘ ‘The Eternity Within’—Signed Away by a Pro-Abortion Veto,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1996, p. B9. 159. Inaccurate and less than vigorous reporting on this issue was abetted by the American press’s commitment to abortion rights. (It is widely acknowledged that abortion coverage by the press is skewed leftward. The Los Angeles Times’ David Shaw documented this bias in a series of articles published in 1990. See David Shaw, ‘‘Abortion Bias Sweeps into News,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1990, p. 10f. See also John Leo, ‘‘All the News That Fits Our Biases,’’ U.S. News and World Report, June 10, 1996, p. 26; L. Brent Bozell III, ‘‘ ‘News’ Prejudice Against Pro-Lifers Is Order of the Day,’’ Human Events, February 28, 1997, p. 11; and Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion: 1838–1988 (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988). The alleged ‘‘rarity’’ of partial-birth abortion was the party line of the abortion establishment until Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, confessed that in a November 1995 edition of ‘‘Nightline’’—in a statement that never even aired—he ‘‘lied through his teeth’’ about the rarity of partial-birth abortion and the reasons for its performance. In fact, he acknowledged, he knew all along that thousands of these hideous killing procedures occur each year and that the vast majority of them are done on the healthy babies of healthy women. Fitzsimmons’ lie, which he had been peddling to his clients and ‘‘pro-choice’’ advocates, was effective though, as many politicians and public figures supportive of abortion used it as cover for their support of President Clinton’s veto of a congressional ban on partial-birth abortions. For a list of liberals parroting Fitzsimmons’ admitted lie, and the exact words they used—a list featuring names such as Ted Kennedy, Patricia Schroeder, Donna Shalala, Reverend Robert Drinan, Carol Moseley-Braun, Tom Daschle, Barbara Kennelly, and Barbara Boxer—see ‘‘They ‘Lied Through Their Teeth’,’’ Human Events, March 14, 1997, p. 3. For news accounts and analysis of Fitzsimmons’ mea culpa, obviously the result of a tormented soul, or, perhaps, the last gasps of a seared conscience, see ‘‘Abortion-Rights Backer Reveals ‘Lie’,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1997, p. A18; ‘‘Abortionist’s Lie,’’ Human Events, March 7, 1997, p. 4; Mona Charen, ‘‘Telling Lies about Partial-Birth Abortions,’’ The Orange County Register, March 4, 1997, p. Metro 9; ‘‘The Fitzsimmons ‘Revelation’,’’ The Weekly Standard, March 17, 1997, p. 9; and William Powers, ‘‘Partial Truths,’’ The New Republic, March 24, 1997, pp. 19–20. 160. See Dave Shiflett, ‘‘Dr. Hern and Mr. Clinton,’’ The Weekly Standard, November 11, 1996, pp. 14–15. 161. Michael Greenburg, ‘‘Your ‘Ad Watch’ on Abortion Was Misleading,’’ Letter to the editor, Orange County Register, November 11, 1996. 162. See Charles T. Canady, ‘‘Absolute Right to Abort?’’ The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 1996, p. A14. 163. Quoted in ‘‘Who is Right About the Partial-Birth Abortion Procedure,’’ letters to the editor, Orange County Register, May 27, 1996, p. Metro 7.

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164. For the full debunking of partial-birth abortion as a sound medical practice, see Nancy Romer, Pamela Smith, Curtis R. Cook, and Joseph L. DeCook, ‘‘Partial Birth Abortion is Bad Medicine,’’ The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1996, p. A20. See also the letter to the editor by the same four doctors in the October 14, 1996 edition of The Wall Street Journal. 165. See George F. Will, ‘‘Where the Logic of Pro-Choice Falls Apart,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1996, p. M5. 166. Shiflett, ‘‘Dr. Hern and Mr. Clinton,’’ p. 15. 167. Nancy G. Romer, M.D., Curtis R. Cook, M.D., Pamela E. Smith, M.D., and Joseph L. DeCook, M.D., ‘‘Abortions of Healthy Babies,’’ Letters to the Editor, of The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1996. 168. For comprehensive analysis of this disastrous social trend, see David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995) and David Popenoe, Life Without Father (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996). 169. Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, p. 1. 170. See the discussion on this general point by Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power (New York: Berkley Books, 1993), p. 13. 171. James Q. Wilson traces a similar thought pattern in his The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 175. 172. Of course, much could be said about each of these slogans. I only briefly mention them here to draw attention to their susceptibility to comprehensive critique. 173. For examples, see ‘‘Abortion Surveillance—United States, 1991,’’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Surveillance Summaries, May 5, 1995, MMWR 1995; 44 (No. SS-2) and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, ‘‘Facts in Brief,’’ March 15, 1993. See also Alan Guttmacher Institute, Abortion Factbook, 1992 Edition: Readings, Trends, and State and Local Data to 1988 (New York: Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1992). 174. Nancyjo Mann, Foreword to Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No More, p. xvi. 175. This is a conservative estimate. See the survey data in Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No More, p. 333 and Mathewes-Green, Real Choices, appendices B-G. 176. For elaboration, see George Weigel, ‘‘Women Reap the Rewards of Roe in Abuse,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1992, p. M5. 177. These developmental markers are noted in standard texts, including F. Beck, D. B Moffat, and D. P. Davies, Human Embryology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985); Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1977); Andre E. Hellegers, ‘‘Fetal Development,’’ in Thomas A. Mappes and Jane S. Zembaty, eds., Biomedical Ethics (New York: Macmillan 1981), pp. 405–409; and Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik, Rites of Life: The Scientific Evidence of Life Before Birth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing, 1983). 178. Wolf, ‘‘Our Bodies, Our Souls.’’ 179. See the commentary on this theme by Thomas Murphy Goodwin, M.D., ‘‘The ‘Medicalizing’ of Abortion Decisions,’’ in Stetson, The Silent Subject. 180. I am indebted to William B. Allen for this point.

4 CONCLUDING REMARKS: HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The disaster in the midst of which we are living is a disaster in the character of men. —Walter Lippmann

It is perhaps the most basic shortcoming of contemporary liberalism that despite the horrors of this century, and despite the stunning display of man’s inhumanity to man even in the midst of the most impressive technological innovations in human history, it persists in its unalloyed anthropological optimism. The modern liberal mind continues to embrace the naive Enlightenment equation of technological, chronological, and moral progress. Greater technological accomplishments and the passage of time indicate that we must now morally ‘‘know better’’ than our forbears and further, that our moral compass is today better equipped to navigate the capricious social forces of human civilization. This notion is quite mistaken. The twentieth century—with two world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and massive intertribal warfare in Africa—is easily the most violent and murderous in human history. A new millennium and Internet access no more promise a morally virtuous and tolerably just society than do a longer average lifespan or more cable channels on television. The liberal hubris that effectively holds otherwise has led to an insufficient caution on the part of liberal academic and political leaders toward the dehumanizing possibilities of high technology.1 This is not to endorse a Luddite retreat from technology, but rather to highlight the inevitable slippery slope that accompanies landings on new technological, medical, and political shores. As the twenty-first century unfolds, such excursions will multiply tremendously, and in the absence

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of a solid and stable understanding of the sui generis and inviolable value of every human being (in utero and ex utero, young and old, female and male, handicapped and strong)—an understanding we presently lack— abuses of human life are very likely. Lest this assessment be deemed alarmist, we should recall that already in the space of a generation, we have moved from the institutionalization of abortion on demand (which now consumes the lives of 1.5 million pre-born human beings each year) to talk of active euthanasia and a burgeoning ‘‘right to die’’ movement, to de facto infanticide (in the form of ‘‘partial-birth’’ abortion), to biomedical research on human embryos and fetal tissue transplantation. And now, as human cloning looms as the next frontier for technological conquest, we mechanically lurch toward it, caught in the grip of a scientific ‘‘manifest destiny’’ permitted by our corrupted understanding of human dignity.2 Steered by the anthropological assumptions of modern liberalism, we mistakenly believe that we should do whatever we are capable of doing. Yet, obviously, raw technological ability does not make for genuine moral justification. As the new millennium progresses, utilitarian challenges to the intrinsic worthiness of every human being will mount, and the pressure to allow the ends to justify the means will tempt us to further objectify and instrumentalize human persons vulnerable to manipulation (the preborn, the infirm, the aged, etc.). All the while liberal ‘‘experts’’ will be at the ready to hold our coats as we stone the dignity intrinsic to us, assured by them of all the benefits our degradation of the weak will bring to others. Surely only by resisting the consequentialist tides of today’s ascendant liberal mind will we be able to affirm the inherent worth and worthiness of every human being. Indeed, the ultimate overthrow of the main counsels of contemporary liberalism—moral egalitarianism and atomistic individualism—is the grand prescription for a return to civil society. But that is a long-term project of cultural renewal, and certainly one far beyond the present ability of the conservative counter-establishment to effect.3 Yet concerned citizens of goodwill can advocate specific ideas that could set into motion social macro-changes able to catalyze a cultural renascence, a civic paradigm shift that can restore and preserve a sound conception of human dignity and public life. CHARACTER Achieving such a re-civilization requires an assault on the contemporary liberal cult of rights and rights talk, and the concomitant aversion to personal responsibility infecting the body politic. To develop an ethos of duty rather than entitlement, and to maintain a renewed civic culture once achieved, explicit cultural conversation about the significance of

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character is critical. A widely diffused public contemplation on the importance of good character, and indeed, on the very possibility of good character itself, would do much to rehumanize our increasingly brutal culture. Such moral seriousness is unknown in mass American culture today. But given what seems to be the generally accepted proposition that all people possess a character, and the growing weariness with the American decline felt by common citizens, as well as the general recognition that the exceptionally virtuous do exist among us, character and the sense of duty it implies represents an idea that could be widely contemplated. It has the potential to coalesce opposition to the dominant, selfish rights and entitlement mentality. Character is the complex of thoughts and attitudes that directly shape our actions and reactions. It is, in the deepest sense, what one is; the substance of one’s person. The definition of character is a larger articulation of not just what is the right thing to do, but what is the right way to be, the sorts of moral attitudes and dispositions I should embrace and cultivate within myself. Discussions about character do not typically revolve around the question, ‘‘What ethical principles should be observed?’’ Rather, they center on the logically prior question, ‘‘What kind of person observes ethical principles?’’ This latter question’s subject of inquiry is the human person and the components of personality and self-understanding that constitute the good man or woman. Such a question is integral to the desire of conservatives for social renewal as well as to the desire of liberals for what they understand as ‘‘fairness’’ and ‘‘equality’’ to predominate in society. (For without people’s observance of the principles of fairness and equality—as liberals see them—these values will not prevail. Hence, despite their official commitment to value neutrality, liberals can be engaged in primary moral and characterological questions such as ‘‘What kind of person observes ethical principles?’’) But since modern liberalism sees value selection as a radically private process—that is, the values one recognizes, respects, or retains are purely the products of personal feelings and choice—many people unreflectively believe that one’s own values are absolutely exempt from normative, right-wrong judgments. In the popular mind, since one’s values are the product of one’s self-validating opinions, they are immune from any objective evaluation. They are simply my personal thoughts, which I am entitled to hold unmolested by government, tyrants, or conservative moralizers. Lacking any overarching understanding of virtuous character, this modern liberal sensibility fosters moral debate tinged with arbitrariness and fortuity, as well as public impotence concerning the articulation and defense of human virtue, and thereby, human dignity. It fails to see that in mundane matters like pizza toppings or favorite

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colors, subjective taste rightly reigns. But with reference to moral values and ethical ideas there is a normative imperative, a need to arbitrate between conflicting claims and decide the ethically appropriate course. The very presence of public moral debate attests to our actual awareness of this reality. Yet our present social and cultural hesitancy to explicitly and consciously outline the primary features of the virtuous person impairs our ability to discern the moral character of ethical problems and modestly move toward a more humane civitas. The modern liberal commandment to be ‘‘tolerant’’ and not to impose the majority’s (traditional) values on the minority has brought us to ethical gridlock: we are unwilling to publicly declare and recommend the basics of human decency which we all know to be true and which most of us live by daily, and which we in fact consider normative. These foundations include, among others: telling the truth, keeping one’s promises, respecting other people and their property, giving people what they deserve, evaluating people based on their behavior rather than their appearance, and working diligently at a job or school. The articulation of a public, nonsectarian conception of rudimentary human goodness—and the protection it offers for human dignity—is ultimately attainable. The liberal relativist reluctance to attempt such a description can be overcome. Indeed, for most of this country’s history, a morally substantive public conception of basic civility prevailed. If such an understanding were beyond our reach today, we would find it impossible to maintain the general public approval of many still widely observed laws, ranging from prohibitions on rape, tax evasion, and hate crimes to laws protecting the environment, endangered species, and basic free speech. We must admit that we are naturally morally informed. Moral concern is hardwired, as it were, into the human individual. Indeed, if I did not morally know some values without any proof or explanation given to me about their nature, I could not know any values by means of proof or explanation. My moral analysis could never begin, and yet, as individuals and as a society we conduct moral analyses constantly, whether in determining to return a phone call or in writing tax codes. After all, who of us today could honestly say they are unprepared to judge the character and lifestyle of Adolf Hitler, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, John Wayne Gacy, or Jesus Christ? The conduct of our daily lives presupposes a rather extensive moral knowledge on our part. Yet, our modern liberal social ethos seeks to herd us as a culture into a cave of moral agnosticism and ignorance, so that its protected vices (abortion, reverse racism, reverse sexism, homosexual practices, insufficiently punishing criminals et al.) will not be openly decried, and the hypocrisies of contemporary liberalism vigorously and comprehensively exposed. But the enduring fact is that we do know

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some practices are right and some practices are wrong, and that the social hegemony of contemporary liberalism cannot permanently suppress this knowledge. Human character and behavior matter deeply, and not every political paradigm adequately recognizes this reality. Neither do all political philosophies offer equal protection to the intrinsic dignity of every human person. Unless and until we are again willing to begin incorporating our foundational moral knowledge into an explicit, public expression of the first principles of virtuous human character, the moral controversies of today will persist in yielding little but deep division and abiding frustration. The full reality of human dignity will continue to be obscured, even while we speak so loudly of freedom and rights.

NOTES 1. See Douglas Groothuis, The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1997) for a discussion of the inability of technology alone to provide protection and fulfillment for human beings. While appreciative of the benefits of high technology and its valuable applications for commercial and informational purposes, Groothuis wisely cautions against exalting the machine above the person. He reminds us that information management is not wisdom and that the human soul craves a much deeper communion with other people and their Maker than the ‘‘Digitopia’’ of cyberspace can provide. Indeed, contrary to the increasingly sterile silicon culture of technologized American life, human beings are more than ‘‘data clusters.’’ There are some ideas—the eternal truths that bless our lives with fulfillment—which we will never see clearly in a shimmering computer screen. While the lure of high technology has tempted some to forget this basic truth, others, even some involved in high technology itself remain aware of it. Indeed, they even pursue these truths in radically unconventional and dangerously gnostic ways, the most notable recent example being the Heaven’s Gate cult, which committed mass suicide just before Easter 1997. (For details, see the many stories about Heaven’s Gate in the Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1997.) While the explanations for these peoples’ self-destruction are no doubt many and complex, clearly their low view of human life here and now—and the utter misapprehension of intrinsic human dignity that view entailed—was central to their pathological yearning to be free of what they termed their earthly ‘‘containers.’’ Their tragic suicides, committed in the belief that they were going to meet with aliens traveling in a spaceship hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet, reminds us of G. K. Chesterton’s wise remark to the effect that ‘‘When people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything.’’ 2. The literature on human cloning is already vast and rapidly accumulating. On moral aspects of cloning and biomedical manipulation generally, see Donald Demarco, Biotechnology and the Assault on Parenthood (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991); Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Philip Elmer-Dewitt, ‘‘Cloning: Where Do We Draw the Line?’’ Time, No-

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vember 8, 1993, pp. 65–70; and John A. Robertson, ‘‘The Question of Human Cloning,’’ Hastings Center Report, 24, March/April 1994, pp. 6–14. For a discussion of the 1997 cloning controversy, ignited by the cloning of Dolly the sheep, see Sharon Begley, ‘‘Little Lamb Who Made Thee?’’ Newsweek, March 10, 1997, pp. 53–59; Kenneth L. Woodward, ‘‘Today the Sheep . . . ,’’ Newsweek, March 10, 1997, p. 60; ‘‘Thinking Twice about Cloning,’’ New York Times, February 27, 1997, p. A12; Ronald Dworkin et al., ‘‘Cloning: How Do We Morally Navigate the Uncharted Future?’’ Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1997, p. B9; ‘‘The World After Cloning,’’ U.S. News and World Report, March 10, 1997, pp. 59–62; and Stanton Peele, ‘‘Send in the Clones,’’ The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1997, p. A18. Embodying the ethos of rights-based contemporary liberalism, and illustrating why it is unable to shield human dignity from technological innovations, is biomedical ethicist Ruth Macklin, who has already discovered a ‘‘right to clone.’’ She writes that ‘‘Infertile couples are . . . likely to seek out cloning. That such couples have other options (in vitro fertilization or adoption) is not an argument for denying them the right to clone.’’ Ruth Macklin, ‘‘Human Cloning? Don’t Just Say No,’’ U.S. News and World Report, March 10, 1997, p. 64. Emphasis added. 3. See Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), Chapter 17, for his recommendations for American cultural recovery.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY This bibliography contains books that were important in the formation of this work, as well as sources that are valuable for the further study of human dignity and contemporary liberalism. Ackerman, Bruce. Social Justice and the Liberal State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982. America, Richard F., ed. The Wealth of Races: The Present Benefits of Past Injustices. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Arkes, Hadley. First Things. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Baker, Herschel Clay. The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith Publishers, 1975. Barry, Brian. The Liberal Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. ———. Theories of Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Baynes, Kenneth. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls and Habermas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Beckwith, Francis J. Politically-Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1993. Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ———. Situating the Self. New York: Routledge, 1992. Bennett, William. The De-Valuing of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. ———. The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. ———, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters. Body Count. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Berger, Peter. Capitalist Revolution, 50 Propositions about Prosperity. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

172

Selected Bibliography

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Habermas, Ju¨ rgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York: Scribner’s, 1992. Hampshire, Stuart, ed. Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Harrison, Beverly Wildung. Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983. Harrison, Lawrence. Who Prospers? How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Hayek, Friedrich A. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Hensley, Jeff Lane, ed. The Zero People. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Books, 1983. Henry, William A., III. In Defense of Elitism. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve. New York: The Free Press, 1994. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The De-Moralization of Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Holmes, Stephen. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Horowitz, David. Radical Son. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Howard, Philip K. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America. New York: Warner Books, 1994. Hoy, David Couzens, and Thomas McCarthy. Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. Hunter, James Davison. Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars. New York: The Free Press, 1994. Jaggar, Allison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. Jencks, Christopher. Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty and the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———, and Paul E. Peterson, eds. The Urban Underclass. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 199l. Johnson, Philip E. Reason in the Balance. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995. Kamm, F. M. Creation and Abortion: A Study in Moral and Legal Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kautz, Steven. Liberalism and Community. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995. Keyes, Alan. Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America. New York: William Morrow, 1995. Kimball, Robert. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Kolata, Gina. The Baby Doctors: Probing the Limits of Fetal Medicine. New York: Dell Publishing, 1990. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: Autobiography of an Idea. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

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Kukathas, C., and P. Pettit. Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Kymlicka, Will. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. Contemporary Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Loury, Glenn. One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Lowi, Theodore J. The End of Liberalism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Luker, Kristen. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Lynch, Frederick R. Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991. ———. The Diversity Machine. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Machan, Tibor. Private Rights and Public Illusions. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995. MacIntyre, Alisdair. Against the Self-Images of the Age. Notre Dame, Ind.: University Press of Notre Dame, 1978. ———. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. ———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Mack, Dana. The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Magnet, Myron. The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass. New York: William Morrow, 1993. Malachowski, Alan, ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Mall, David, ed. When Life and Choice Collide: Essays on Rhetoric and Abortion. Vol. 1, To Set the Dawn Free. David Mall, ed. Libertyville, Ill.: Kairos Books, 1994. Marcel, Gabirel. The Existential Background of Human Dignity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Maritain, Jacques. The Person and the Common Good. Translated by John J. Fitzgerald. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966. Marshall, Robert, and Charles Donovan. Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Mathewes-Green, Frederica. Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion. Sisters, Oreg.: Questar Publications, 1994. Matusow, Alan. The Unravelling of America. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. McFadden, Charles Joseph. The Dignity of Life: Moral Values in a Changing Society. Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1976. McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. McGrath, Alistair. A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996. Medved, Michael. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

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Moltmann, Jurgen. On Human Dignity. Translated by M. Douglas Meeks. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Montgomery, John Warwick. Human Rights and Human Dignity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986. Moreland, J. P., and Norman L. Geisler. The Life and Death Debate: Moral Issues of Our Time. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1990. Moreland, J. P., and David Ciocchi, eds. Christian Perspectives on Being Human: An Integrative Approach. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1993. Mott, Stephen Charles. Biblical Ethics and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Mulhall, Stephen, and Adam Swift. Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. Murray, Charles. Losing Ground. New York, Basic Books, 1984. ———. In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. ICS Press edition. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994. Myer, Michael J., and William Parent, eds. The Constitution of Rights: Human Dignity and American Values. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Narveson, Jan. The Libertarian Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Nathanson, Bernard. Aborting America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. ———. The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality. New York: Frederick Fell, 1983. ———. The Hand of God: A Journey from Death to Life by the Abortion Doctor Who Changed His Mind. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996. Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984. ———. America Against Itself. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. ———, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr Today. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989. Newman, Jay. Foundations of Religious Tolerance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Nilsson, Lennart. A Child Is Born. New York: Dell Publishing, 1977. Novak, Michael. Free Persons and the Common Good. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1989. ———. The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Olasky, Marvin. The Press and Abortion: 1838–1988. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988. ———. Abortion Rights. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1992. ———. The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1992. Packer, J. I., and Thomas Howard. Christianity: The True Humanism. Waco, Tex.: Word, 1985. Patterson, Orlando. Ethnic Chauvinism. New York: Stein and Day, 1977. Popenoe, David. Life Without Father. New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996. Prager, Dennis. Think a Second Time. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

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Raffel, Stanley. Habermas, Lyotard and the Concept of Justice. London: Macmillan Press, 1992. Raphael, D. D. Problems of Political Philosophy. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1990. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Reeves, Thomas C. The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Reichmann, James B. Philosophy of the Human Person. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985. Richburg, Keith. Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Roberts, Paul Craig, and Lawrence M. Stratton. The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1995. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, ed. The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Rosenblum, Nancy L., ed. Liberalism and the Moral Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Roth, Byron. Prescription of Failure: Race Relations in the Age of Social Science. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1994. Rothman, Stanley, and S. Robert Lichter. Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———, ed. Liberalism and Its Critics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Schaeffer, Francis A., and C. Everett Koop. Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1979. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Schmidt, Alvin J. The Menace of Multiculturalism: Trojan Horse in America. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Scruton, Roger. The Meaning of Conservatism. London: Macmillan, 1980. ———. Modern Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Seifert, Josef. Back to ‘‘Things in Themselves.’’ New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Sen, Amartya, and Bernard Williams, eds. Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Sleeper, Jim. The Closest of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Smith, F. LaGard. When Choice Becomes God. Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House, 1990. Smith, James, and Finis Welch. Closing the Gap: Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks. Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1986. Sniderman, Paul M., and Thomas Piazza. The Scar of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Sobel, Lester A. Quotas and Affirmative Action. New York: Facts on File, 1980. Sowell, Thomas. Race and Economics. New York: Longman, Publishers, 1975. ———. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books, 1981. ———. The Economics and Politics of Race. New York: William Morrow, 1983. ———. Compassion Versus Guilt. New York: William Morrow, 1987. ———. A Conflict of Visions. New York: William Morrow, 1987. ———. Preferential Policies. New York: William Morrow, 1990. ———. Inside American Education. New York: The Free Press, 1992. ———. Race and Culture: A Worldview. New York: Basic Books, 1994. ———. The Vision of the Annointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Sproul, R. C. In Search of Dignity. Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1983. Steele, Shelby. The Content of Our Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. ———. The End of Oppression. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Stetson, Brad. Pluralism and Particularity in Religious Belief. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1994. ———, ed. The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996. Stout, Jeffrey. Ethics after Babel. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Sullivan, William M. Reconstructing Public Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Sykes, Charles L. A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Taylor, Jared. Paved with Good Intentions. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1992. Tinder, Glenn E. Against Fate: An Essay on Personal Dignity. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Tocqueville, Alexis A. de. Democracy in America. (1835). Translated by Henry Reeve. Edited by Phillip Bradley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. Walzer, Michael. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1983. ———. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Webster, Yehudi O. The Racialization of America. New York: William Morrow, 1992. West, Cornel. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Wildavsky, Aaron. The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism. Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1991. Wilson, James Q. The Moral Sense. New York: The Free Press, 1993. ———. On Character. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1995. ———, and Glenn C. Loury. From Children to Citizens. Vol. 3. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987.

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179

Will, George F. Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Wolff, Robert Paul. Understanding Rawls. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

INDEX Abortion, xi–xii, 7, 11, 40 n.61, 112, 130–46, 162 n.153; myths, 142–44; partial-birth abortion, 125, 131, 136– 39, 161 n.132, 163 n.159, 166; social corrosion wrought by, 135–37, 140–41, 146 Abraham, David, 128 Accomplishment (philosophy of), 69– 73 Ackerman, Bruce, 47 Affirmative action, xi, 7, 130, 134, 154 n.51, 161 n.132 African Americans. See Black Americans Allen, William B., 164 n.180 America, cultural condition of, 5, 10, 18–19, 26 n.5, 69–70, 112, 120, 130, 132–35, 140, 144, 166; political situation in, xi, 6–7, 126, 130, 134; quality of civic life in, xi, 18, 113, 127–30, 139, 148 n.15; solutions to social turmoil of, xii, 42 n.69, 112, 132, 135, 141, 166, 169 American Medical News, 138 Amnesty International, 16 Animal rights, 16, 34 n.45 Arnold, Benedict, 119 Aspinall, John, 35 n.45 Auschwitz, 3, 19

Baudrillard, Jean, 19 Behaviorism, 16 Bell, Daniel, 58, 63 The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray), 124 Bellah, Robert, 26 n.8, 28 n.11 Bennett, William J., 155 n.64 Berger, Peter, 28 n.11, 34 n.44, 45 Black, Keith, 123 Black Americans, 80 n.64, 127, 134, 158 n.104, 160 n.26; anger of, 113–21, 123; anti-achievement ethic, 117–18; predicament of black conservatives, 118–20; suspicions held by, 116 Blankenhorn, David, 87, 102 Blaylock, Za’kettha, 118 Bloom, Alan, 87 Bork, Robert H., 5, 28 n.12, 40 n.61, 87, 146 n.2 Boxer, Barbara, 163 n.159 Brandley, Robin, 128 Breindel, Eric, 114 Brown, Nicole, 158 n.102 Brown, Willie, 149 n.15 Brown v. Board of Education, 124 Buchanan, Patrick, 146 n.1

182

Index

California State University, Northridge, 122–23 Callahan, Patrick, 34 n.44 Canavan, Francis, 12–13, 78 n.36 Carson, Ben, 123 Carter, Stephen, 123 Carville, James, 7 Casey, Robert, 112 Character, 11, 16–17, 58–60, 66, 72, 91, 166–69 Chesterton, G. , 169 n.1 China, 135–36 ‘‘Choice,’’ 22, 24, 133–34, 137, 139–42, 144–46 Christianity, 15, 33 n.43, 38 n.53, 93– 94, 98, 156 n.75 Churchill, Larry, 46 The Citadel, 152 n.38 CityTeam Ministries, 96–99 Civic republicanism, 28 n.11 Civil rights movement, 95 Clark, Alfred, 128 Classical liberalism, xiv, 5, 28 n.12, 32 n.38 Cleaver, Eldridge, 117 Clinton, Bill, 37 n.50, 89–90, 104, 114, 136, 139, 151 n.22, 156 n.75, 161 n.132, 163 n.159 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 14, 89, 136, 147 n.5 Cloning, 166 Collectivism (economic), xiv, 67, 71 Commentary, 27 n.9 Communitarianism, 28 n.11, 48–51, 169 n.1 Connerly, Ward, 149 n.15 Connor, Bull, 139 Conscience, 51, 77 n.29 Conservatism, 91, 95, 100, 103–4, 112, 119–20; concerns of, 5, 69, 101; types of, 27 n.11 Contemporary liberalism, xii–xiv, 23, 28 nn.11–12, 43, 67, 70, 101, 103, 149 n.15; adherents’ devotion to, 26 n.9, 69; conception of human beings, xii, 7–9, 11, 14; confidence in government, 14, 68, 87–90; consonance with postmodernism, 21–23;

contrasted with classical liberalism, 5, 7, 12, 28 n.12, 32 n.38; harmfulness of, xii, 9, 14, 16, 22–23, 25, 37 n.50, 41 n.67, 105, 107, 115, 124, 127, 132, 135–37, 139, 146, 147 n.6, 167; intentions of, 10, 99; intolerance of, 107–12, 121, 126; irreligiosity of, 91–92, 95; moral particularity of, 69, 72, 78 n.36, 90; nature of, xii, 5–6, 9, 12–14, 16, 18– 19, 22–23, 25, 26 n.8, 44, 51, 54–55, 60, 67, 68, 70, 91, 105–6, 109, 115– 16, 121, 125–26, 133, 144, 166, 168; permissiveness of, 9, 149 n.15; political style of, 4–7, 10, 22, 44, 68–70, 72, 89–90, 92, 104–5, 117, 122, 124– 25, 144, 146; public hostility toward, 9, 44, 67–68, 90–91; relativism in, 12, 14, 22–23; self-righteousness of, 6–7, 68–69, 104–7; self-understanding of, 14; sympathy of, 96–99, 106–7, 156 n.66; utopianism of, 68, 87–91, 165; view of human dignity, 10–11, 22, 25, 64; view of human self, 46, 57–64, 66. See also Egalitarianism; Interest groups Conti, Joseph G., 160 n.130 Cosby, Ennis, 128 Cose, Ellis, 115 Cranston, Maurice, 108 Crime, 36 n.48, 44–45, 71, 73 n.4, 105, 107, 127, 158 n.104 Crowley, Brian, 49–50, 63, 79 n.54 Dachau, 3, 19 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 110 Daschle, Tom, 163 n.159 Davis, Jack, 149–50 n.15 de Beauvoir, Simone, 112 Deconstruction, 20–21, 39 n.55. See also Postmodernism de Man, Paul, 20, 39 n.55 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 88 Derrida, Jacques, 19 Desert, xii, 43–45, 55–73, 80 n.64 ‘‘Digitopia,’’ 169 n.1 Dignity. See Human dignity DiIulio, John J., Jr., 107, 156 n.66

Index

183

Doctors, 143–44 Dole, Bob, 104, 139 Donahue, Phil, 14 Douglass, Frederick, 160 n.127 Dred Scott, 23 Drinan, Robert, 163 n.159 D’Souza, Dinesh, 87 Du Bois, W.E.B., 123 Dukakis, Michael, 9 Dworkin, Ronald, 47

Glendon, Mary Ann, 4, 26 n.5, 47 Goldman, Ronald, 158 n.102 Goldsmith, Teddy, 35 n.45 Good, 53–55, 101. See also Human identity, ends of Gray, John, 67 Green, Justin, 128 Greer, Ron, 111 Groothuis, Douglas, 169 n.1 Guadalupe Creek, 98–99

Ebonics, 117 Egalitarianism, 5, 16, 18, 21, 23, 66, 68, 72, 106, 166 Egoism, 24–25, 41 n.67. See also Selfishness Elder, Larry, 119–20, 160 n.122 Etzioni, Amitai, 48 Euthanasia, 134

Hallowell, John, 32 n.38 Hammer, Susan, 96 Harvest Crusades, 102–4 Haskell, Martin, 137, 139 Hauerwas, Stanley, 13, 48 Hayek, F. A., 67, 79 n.54 Heaven’s Gate, 169 n.1 Hennessey, Michael, 149 n.15 Henry, William A., III, 68, 72, 87 Hern, Warren, 137–39 Herrnstein, Richard, 124 Hills, Carla, 111 Hitler, Adolf, 18, 36 n.49, 41 n.67, 110, 125, 168 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 41 n.67 Holden, Nate, 114 Homelessness. See CityTeam Ministries Homosexuality, 7, 11, 69, 106, 109–12, 130, 134 Horkheimer, Max, 39 n.54 Horton, Willie, 9 Howard, Phillip K., 87 Human dignity, xi, xiii, 9, 12, 14–18, 23, 25, 33 n.43, 34 n.44, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 128, 133, 166, 169; bases of, 14, 33 n.43, 47, 50–51; implications of, 12, 135; intrinsic vs. extrinsic, 14– 18; as political tool, 3, 10–11, 14; protection of, 25; recognized, 34 n.44, 135; as self-esteem, 10–11, 18, 133. See also Contemporary liberalism, view of human dignity; Human rights; Rights Human identity, 47–51, 61–62, 134–35, 143; ends of, 54, 101; and ownership of immaterial assets, 56–64. See

Fatherlessness, 102, 140–41 Faulkner, Shannon, 152–53 n.38 Feder, Don, 82 n.83 Feinberg, Joel, 3–4 Feminism, 40 n.60, 82 n.85, 101–2, 112, 122, 135–37, 140, 151 n.36 Ferguson, Colin, 113–14 Fitzsimmons, Ron, 163 n.159 Ford, Gerald, 111 Fordham, Signithia, 117 Fortson, Davey, 128 Foucault, Michel, 19, 40 n.59 Fox, Robin, 30 n.22 Frankel, Charles, 58 Frankena, William, 41 n.63 Freedom. See Liberty; Rights Frey, R. G., 26 n.3 Friedan, Betty, 112 Friedman, Milton, 67 Fumento, Michael, 118 Gacy, John Wayne, 110, 168 Gallardo, Carlos Granados, 74 n.4 Gandhi, Mahatma, 131, 168 Ganz, Martin, 128 Gender politics, 7, 101–2, 112, 122, 140–44, 152 n.38 Gingrich, Newt, 37 n.50, 69, 150 n.21

184

Index

Human identity (continued ) also Contemporary liberalism, view of human self Human life, 36 n.48, 127–28, 130–46, 162 n.153, 166 Human nature, xi–xii, 7–8, 11, 14–16, 25, 52, 71, 88–89, 165, 169 n.1; constrained or traditional view of, 8–9, 11, 30 n.22; distinctiveness of, 15–17; moral sense of, xi, 34 n.44, 43–45, 50–51, 65, 71, 73, 77 n.30, 100–101, 145, 168; unconstrained vision of, 8– 9, 14, 90–91, 165. See also Personhood Human rights, 3–4, 131. See also Rights Huss, Cheri Lynn, 128 Hussein, Saddam, 18 Hyde, Henry, 143 Ice Cube, 114 Immigration, xi, 7, 94, 97 Imperial, Julian, 77 n.29 India, 135–36 Individualism, 5, 14, 154 n.54, 166 Interest groups, 4, 11, 116–17, 135 Iscariot, Judas, 119 Jackson, Jesse, 104, 114, 121 Jesus Christ, 93–94, 168 Jim Crow, 118, 132 John Paul II (Pope), 31 n.35 Judeo-Christian moral tradition, 7–8, 12, 15, 23, 91–92, 100, 102, 112, 127, 133 Justice, 56–64, 73, 80 n.64. See also Desert; Good; Rawls, John Kant, Immanuel, 5, 51–52, 56, 60–61, 63 Kaufman, Barbara, 149 n.15 Kelly, Dean, 150 n.16 Kennedy, John F., 29 n.12 Kennedy, Robert, 29 n.12 Kennedy, Ted, 163 n.159 Kennelly, Barbara, 163 n.159 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 29 n.12, 123, 131 King, Rodney, 112

Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 111 Kulturkampf, xi, 103 Kuran, Timur, 113, 125, 160 n.129 Kymlicka, Will, 47, 75 n.14, 78 n.34 Lasch, Christopher, 28 n.11 Lerner, Michael, 89, 147 n.5 Levada, William, 110 Leyba, Steven Johnson, 149 n.15 Liberalism, xiii, 12–13, 28 n.12, 32 n.38, 42 n.68, 112. See also Classical liberalism; Contemporary liberalism Liberty, 13, 67, 69–71, 106, 110, 130; ordered to higher end, 13, 15, 88– 89. See also Rights Limbaugh, Rush, 37 n.50 Lippmann, Walter, xiv, 3, 43, 87, 165 Locke, John, 5, 56, 62, 79 n.42 Los Angeles Times, 105 Loury, Glenn, 123, 127 Lowry, Joseph, 119 Lyles, James Lee, 74 n.4 Machan, Tibor, 81 n.71 MacIntyre, Alisdair, xi, 47–48, 54, 62, 80 n.64 Macklin, Ruth, 170 n.2 Madison, James, 8 Magnet, Myron, 87 Malcolm X, 114 Malveaux, Julianne, 114 Mann, Nancyjo, 142 Marxism, 66, 68, 106, 141 Matsaura, Go, 128 May, Bill, 119 McCarthy, Joseph, 111 McCorvey, Norma, 131 McGrath, Alistair, 38 n.52 McKinney, Cynthia, 115 Mead, Lawrence, 71 Meritocracy, 57, 66–67, 70–73. See also Desert; Rawls, on redistribution Mill, John Stuart, 5 Minkowitz, Donna, 151 n.36 The Mirage of Social Justice (Hayek), 67 Montgomery, John W., 75 n.9 Moore, G. E., 24 Moose, Ed, 149 n.15

Index Moral relativism. See Contemporary liberalism, relativism in Morris, Dick, 104 Mosley-Braun, Carol, 163 n.159 Mother Teresa, 168 Mulhall, Stephen, 54 Multiculturalism, 123, 156 n.72. See also Pluralism Munnell, Alicia, 118 Murder, 73 n.4, 127–30 Murray, Cecil, 124 Murray, Charles, 10–11, 31 n.28, 124 Murray, Lynette, 128 Nathanson, Bernard, 82 n.85 Nelson, Lemrick, 114, 158 n.93 Neuhaus, Richard John, 28 n.11, 38 n.50, 46, 91, 112 New Deal, xiv, 9–10 The New Republic, 13 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 154 n.54 1960s (decade of), xiv, 5, 13, 16, 37, 45, 87, 90 Nisbet, Robert, 28 n.11 Novak, Michael, 28 n.11, 48, 75 n.15, 79 n.42 Novis, Corinne, 128 Nozick, Robert, 56, 60–64, 75 n.15, 79 n.42, 80 n.64 Ogbu, John, 117 Olasky, Marvin, 150 n.21 Orwell, George, 143 Osbourne, Wendy, 128 Outka, Gene, 32 n.40 Out-of-wedlock births, 106, 155 n.61 Paglia, Camille, 102 Parker, Nicole, 128 Patterson, Orlando, 123 Personhood, 16, 32 n.41, 33 n.42, 35 n.45, 77 n.25, 128, 134–35. See also Human identity; Human nature Peterson, Jesse, 120 Physicians’ Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth, 138–39 Piazza, Thomas, 116 Pluralism, 6, 75 n.15, 100

185

Podhoretz, Norman, 27 n.9 Political correctness, 6, 18, 22, 68, 122, 125, 140 Postmodernism, 19–24, 39 n.55, 40 n.59 Prager, Dennis, 69, 82 n.84, 106–7, 111, 115, 157 n.76 Preference falsification, 29 n.13, 125 Pro-life movement, 16, 121, 130–32, 142 Promise Keepers, 101–2, 104, 151 n.36 Public truth, 124–27 Racial discrimination, 23, 100, 116, 118 Racial politics, xi–xii, 7, 113–27; colorcoordinated thinking of, 121–24 Ramirez, Richard, 72 Raphael, Sally Jesse, 93 Rawls, John, 45–67, 75 n.14, 75 n.15, 78 n.34, 78 n.36, 79 n.54, 81 nn.70– 71; anthropology of, 48–50, 59–65; commonalitites with Nozick, 56; ‘‘difference principle’’ of, 46, 57–59; ‘‘original position’’ of, 46, 52–53; on redistribution, 55–64; on right vs. good, 51–55 Reagan, Ronald, 111 Religious belief, 6, 38 n.53, 91–104, 148 n.15, 150 n.16; personal value of, 92–95; social value of, 95–102 Rice, Condoleeza, 123 Rights, 3–4, 13, 23, 66; proliferation of, 4, 18, 154 n.54, 170 n.2; ‘‘Rights talk,’’ 4–5, 10, 12, 24–25, 26 n.3, 170 n.2. See also Liberty Robertson, Patrick, 96–99 Roe v. Wade, 23, 40 n.61 Rorty, Richard, 47 Rosenbaum, Yankel, 114, 158 n.93 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 5, 7 Ryen family, 128 Salk, Jonas, 72–73 Sandel, Michael, 27 n.10, 28 n.11, 47– 48, 53, 58, 75 n.14, 75 n.15, 78 n.36 Schroeder, Patricia, 163 n.159 Seiler, Bill, 128

186

Index

Self. See Contemporary liberalism, view of human self; Human identity Self-esteem, 10–11, 18, 31 n.28, 106, 133 Self-expression, 109–10 Selfishness, 24–25. See also Egoism Shalala, Donna, 163 n.159 Simpson, O. J., 114, 158 n.102 Skinner, B. F., 16, 35 n.45 Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Bork), 5 Smith, Adam, 5 Smith, Pamela, 138 Smith, Susan, 37 n.50 Sniderman, Paul M., 116 Social silence, 124–26, 138, 160 n.129. See also Public truth Sommers, Christina Hoff, 82 n.85, 87 Souljah, Sistah, 114 Southall, Angela, 128 Soviet Union, 6 Sowell, Thomas, 8, 31 n.24, 90 Sproul, R. C., 33 n.43 Stalin, Josef, 110 Steele, Shelby, 116 Stein, Mary R., 77 n.29 Steinem, Gloria, 102 Suicide, 36 n.50, 93–94, 169 n.1 Sullivan, William, 25, 47 Swift, Adam, 54

Taylor, Charles, 47, 54–55 Texaco, 118 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 45 Thomas, Clarence, 115, 118, 149 n.15 Tolerance, 22; contemporary understanding of, 6, 107–12, 125 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 16 Voltaire, 5, 7 Volunteerism, 96 Walzer, Michael, 28 n.11, 82 n.74 War on Poverty, 9 Washington, D.C., 90, 118 Welfare reform, xi, 95 White, Reggie, 114 Whitehead, Barbara, 155 n.61 Will, George, 9, 30 n.22, 91, 138 Williams, Walter, 118 Williams, Willie, 114 Wilson, James Q., 30 n.22 Wolf, Naomi, 131, 143 Women, 7, 135, 140–44, 153 n.38. See also Feminism; Gender politics Women Exploited by Abortion, 142 Woodson, Robert, 120 World War I, 28 n.12 World War II, xiv, 28 n.12, 37, 145

About the Author BRAD STETSON is Director of Studies at the David Institute. He has previously published four books with Praeger, including Pluralism and Particularity in Religious Belief (1994) and The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture (1996).